Helen Hanft

Helen Hanft was an American actress who built her career in New York's experimental theater before moving into film. Raised in the Bronx, she was steered by her father into an audition for the High School of Performing Arts and was accepted. She began performing in the early 1960s at Off-Off-Broadway venues including Caffe Cino and the La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club, where her comic turns earned her the nickname the Ethel Merman of off-off-Broadway. She specialized in eccentric characters and appeared in many plays by Tom Eyen, and also worked with David Rabe and John Patrick Shanley. From the mid-1970s she took film roles, often cameos, for Woody Allen in Manhattan (1979) and Stardust Memories (1980), and for Paul Mazursky in Next Stop, Greenwich Village (1976). Her other credits included Moonstruck (1987), License to Drive (1988) and Used People (1992), as well as episodes of Law & Order. She died in 2013.