Carol Kane: ‘Once you break into comedy, you have a little more leeway with your looks’

Yes, the outrageously storied character actor Carol Kane is hired by filmmakers today for her chops. And that big, smoky, instantly recognisable New York growl of hers. But surely there’s an appeal to just having her sit on your set and tell anecdotes from her five decades in showbiz?

Her stories are endless. What it was like to be held hostage in Dog Day Afternoon, or slap around Bill Murray in Scrooged. How long it took her to be buried under those witchy prosthetics in The Princess Bride, or how nervous she was to converse in comfortable, romantic gibberish with Andy Kaufman in the seminal sitcom Taxi. Then there’s the rest of her extensive CV. The Last Detail. Addams Family Values. Annie Hall. Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt. God, I wish I was stuck in a lift with her. Or at least an incredibly long car journey. Instead we’re doing a phone interview, time is of the essence, and Kane keeps asking me questions.

“How old are you, Adam?” Kane inquires, raspily yet softly. I tell her I’m 31. She turns on a dime. “Oh, you’re a baby boy! Call me when you’re 60, goodbye!” The 72-year-old lets out a broad howl, befitting for a woman who’s made a career out of playing eccentrics and tricksters. I think I’ve just been Carol Kaned.

I’ve asked about whether she’s ever personally experienced a late-in-life transformation, the theme of her brilliant new film, Between the Temples. It’s a sensitive, odd-couple comedy, in which she plays a retired music teacher who reconnects with one of her old students. Ben (Jason Schwartzman) is a Jewish cantor in mourning over the death of his wife. Kane’s Carla is slightly adrift, her son lives far away, and life in sleepy Upstate New York isn’t scratching that itch anymore. She believes a bat mitzvah could help. Carla is ethnically Jewish through her father, but her parents were communist atheists – therefore no bat mitzvah. She and Ben clash, then bond, then sort of maybe fall in love. Ish. It’s a romp. Think the gentle comedy of Harold and Maude meets the zippy chaos of Uncut Gems. Kane is marvellous.

I ask her that question again. When has she transformed her life? “I suppose, in some ways, you could say this movie is doing that for me,” she says, serious now. “I haven’t played the quote-unquote ‘leading lady’ in a very long time. At my age, one is largely relegated to playing grandmothers, and then those grandmothers are sort of secondary to the story.” This moment, though, feels novel for her. “And I appreciate it more the second time around.”

The first time was trickier. In 1976, The New York Times characterised Kane as someone “who kept drifting, slightly off-centre, through other people’s movies”. This was the age of the American New Wave, a period of radical ideas, extraordinary new talent and sex and violence on film – it was gnarlier, kinkier, more cerebral than ever before. Kane was along for the ride.

She was the mousy bank teller in Dog Day Afternoon, Art Garfunkel’s girlfriend in Carnal Knowledge, a sex worker in The Last Detail, the babysitter menaced over the phone in When a Stranger Calls. In Annie Hall, she is Woody Allen’s socialist intellectual ex who rejects his attempts at a come-on with a single, withering line: “I love being reduced to a cultural stereotype.” Hester Street, a quiet 1975 drama about Russian-Jewish immigrants in New York, drew her enormous critical acclaim and an Oscar nomination.

Kane tells me, though, that she didn’t know what to do with such adulation. “Oh god, Adam, I had no idea,” she whispers, embarrassed. “I made such bad choices, and I turned down so many beautiful opportunities.” She won’t be pressed on what they were, but the memory still stings. She felt undeserving of success, and uncomfortable as a movie star. There is a scene in Between the Temples that casts back to those feelings. Carla, it is revealed, had a short-lived music career, and recorded a single album in the Seventies. We see the album art, featuring a photo of a young Kane. She is supernaturally beautiful in it, all sultry eyes and Botticellian curls of hair. “She was so pretty,” Carla whimpers. “I just didn’t know it.”

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Did she feel that way about herself? “Absolutely,” Kane says. “I never thought I was pretty. I guess that’s not an atypical or unusual syndrome for young women, you know? But I certainly had it in spades.” Her voice is hushed now. She changes the subject, brightening. “Anyway, the dramatic work I’ve done… Hester Street, or The Last Detail, or Wedding in White – did you ever see that? It’s a beautiful movie. Donald Pleasence played my dad – he’s one of your peeps!” She means that he’s British. “I loved that dramatic work, but once you break into comedy, you have a little more leeway with your looks.” She lets out that big laugh again. “You don’t have to rely on them as much!”

It was Gene Wilder who saw something funny about Kane, whose wide eyes had previously only been used for their vulnerability, her croaky voice for its guile. He cast her in his silent-movie satire The World’s Greatest Lover, which led to her moving from New York to Los Angeles and subsequently being cast in Taxi.

My time with Kane is running low at this point, so out of desperation I propose a game. Could I throw out the name of someone Kane has worked with or who she has called a friend, and have her speedily say the first things that come to mind about them? “Ooh, so like a lightning round quiz?” Kane beams. Yes! Exactly like that. She is up for it.

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We begin. (The speedy, succinct lightning round angle is, well, swiftly abandoned). How about Bette Davis? For a bit of background, Kane and Davis were unlikely pals in the early Eighties – Kane, having moved to LA, was living in an apartment building with Davis’s long-time assistant Kathryn Sermak, who introduced them. “I was on my way to Australia to do a movie and I had never been there,” Kane recalls. “I mentioned this to Kathryn, and an hour later an embossed envelope was put under my door. I open it and it reads: ‘I’ve been to Australia. Maybe I can help? Come for drinks at six – Bette Davis.’ Can you f***ing imagine? Oops, I guess I shouldn’t say ‘f***ing’.”

Davis met Kane’s father, and once came to one of Kane’s parties to meet the Taxi cast. “She was so open to meeting young people,” Kane adds. “And she loved men! We had some very handsome men in that cast, you know? We had Tony Danza…”

It’s a great story, but also a long one. See what I mean about needing to be stuck in a lift with her? Time is ticking. I need to throw out another name and fast. Jack Nicholson? “Ding, ding, ding!” Kane chirps, like a slot machine. “I knew you were gonna say Jack.” She has so many stories, she teases. “So we talked about the Academy Awards, right? I’m at the Beverly Hills Hotel, living on my $400 unemployment [cheque], and I don’t win, right? You know who did win that night? Jack! For Cuckoo’s Nest. But the next morning…” Kane pauses for effect. “It’s as quiet as a graveyard in my room. No one is ringing until about 11, and it’s Jack. He says, ‘Whitey…’ – that’s the nickname he gave me – ‘Whitey, you wanna come to lunch with me and Anjelica [Huston]?’ Because he knew what the morning’s like after you don’t win, and he took me to lunch to make me feel better.” They’re still in touch. “Not a lot, but we keep at it. I make sure to check in on him, and thank goodness he’s still answering my calls.” The 87-year-old has been awol for a while – is he doing OK? “Oh, he’s still Jack,” she laughs.

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The publicist who has connected us cuts in. Our time is up. But my game! What about Bill Murray? Tina Fey? Kermit the Frog? Blessedly, Kane is flexible. A negotiation ensues between Kane and the publicist – there can be some more time, but only for a price. “Adam, you owe me £100,” Kane cracks. “I won’t answer the next question until it gets into my account, OK?” Could I get it to her later? “You know what? Yes, you may. I trust you.”

Phew. All right. We start up again. What about Shelley Duvall? We’re speaking a few weeks after Duvall’s death. She and Kane were friends and peers in the Seventies, both playing Allen’s exes in Annie Hall, and both wallflowers on the Hollywood scene. “Ahh, jeez,” Kane sighs. “It’s so sad.” They’d lost contact over the decades, but she remembers her fondly. “Shelley would always take me out to dinner, give me support and friendship and guidance. She was such a complex, brilliant, interesting, generous person.”

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OK, next. Woody Allen…? “Always enigmatic to me, but elusive and brilliant,” she says. “I think that movie [Annie Hall] is extraordinary.” I must ask more, but Kane – a person to whom a tangent is never too far off – interrupts. “You know Annie Hall used to be called Anhedonia, right?” I vaguely knew this, I tell her. It’s the condition wherein you feel nothing – a sort of perpetual numbness. “I always liked that title – it’s pretty fascinating. And I guess it’d force people to go to the dictionary.”

And on that unassuming note, our time is finally up. She apologises, quite genuinely. “Just out of my curiosity, who else was it that you wanted to ask me about?” I mention more names. Murray, Fey, Garfunkel, all of the filmmakers she’s worked under. Mike Nichols. Gus van Sant. Elaine May, for God’s sake! She sighs, moved. “I will say, those people you mentioned – and Hal Ashby, Sidney Lumet, all those people – I just don’t understand how I got so privileged to work with such great artists.” She sounds practically verklempt at this point. “I’ll never get over it.”

We say our goodbyes. Until the day we’re stuck in a lift, anyway. That’d be nice.

‘Between the Temples’ is in cinemas from 23 August