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Anita Gillette

Anita Gillette has built a career across stage, television and film, bringing theatrical precision and an easy conversational presence to an unusually varied collection of roles. Born in Baltimore on August 16, 1936, and raised in Rossville, Maryland, she graduated from Kenwood High School and studied at the Peabody Conservatory before establishing herself as a stage performer. Gillette made her Broadway debut in Gypsy in 1959. Her subsequent credits included Carnival!, All American, Mr. President, Guys and Dolls, Cabaret, They’re Playing Our Song and Brighton Beach Memoirs. Her performance in Chapter Two earned her a Tony Award nomination for Best Actress in a Play in 1978, while her earlier work in Russell Patterson’s Sketchbook brought her a 1960 Theatre World Award. Decades later, she received a Lucille Lortel Award nomination for her performance in Dan LeFranc’s The Big Meal. Television gave Gillette a different kind of visibility. After her first TV appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1963, she joined The Edge of Night and became a familiar guest on New York-based game shows, including What’s My Line?, Match Game and the Pyramid series. Her later television work ranged from Quincy, M.E. and Search for Tomorrow to recurring family roles on The War at Home, CSI and 30 Rock, where she played Liz Lemon’s mother, Margaret. Gillette’s move into film during the 1980s led to Mona in Moonstruck and a run of sharply defined supporting parts. She played mothers in Bob Roberts, Boys on the Side, Larger than Life and She’s the One, finding distinct personalities within a role type that could easily become routine. In Shall We Dance?, she took on the more troubled part of Miss Mitzi, the lonely owner of a struggling dance studio. Later film work included Hiding Victoria and Edward Burns’s The Fitzgerald Family Christmas. Across those shifts in medium and scale, Gillette has remained the kind of performer who can settle quickly into an ensemble and make a character feel fully at home there.