Anne Haney spent two decades playing the woman behind the desk who is not going to be talked round: secretaries, social workers, court supervisors. It is a small trade, and she practised it with more care than most of the films around her deserved.
Fi1m perspective
Watch Anne Haney take a lie. In Liar Liar (1997) she is Greta, secretary to Jim Carrey's Fletcher Reede, and she receives each of his excuses with the same flat, unblinking patience, the face of a woman who has heard every one of them before and stopped listening some time ago. We laughed, and it was the deadness of the delivery that did it. Carrey is spinning at full speed and she simply declines to move.
That was her trade. She came to it late, not acting professionally until 1970, on stage and in commercials in Atlanta, and not reaching films until Hopscotch (1980). What followed was a working actor's career rather than a star's: television guest parts through the 1980s and 1990s, recurring roles on Mama's Family and L.A. Law, a visit each to Star Trek: The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine, and a run of small film roles in which she was, over and over, the person in charge. A judge, a social worker, a mother, a woman with a clipboard.
The best known of those is Mrs. Sellner in Mrs. Doubtfire (1993), the family court supervisor whose visits Robin Williams has to get through in a frock and latex. The film gives her a job rather than a character, and the job is to be the one person in the house who cannot be let in on the joke. Haney does not overplay the sternness, which is why the scenes work as farce rather than as cruelty. She turns up again in The American President (1995) as a White House staffer and in Gus Van Sant's Psycho (1998) as Mrs. Chambers, both parts of the same size and shape.
On stage, by the accounts we trust, she was allowed more. Her Margaret Fielding in Verdigris at Theatre West was noted for its hauteur and for a range the screen roles never asked of her. That is the only reservation anyone has ever recorded about her: not that she did anything badly, but that the parts stayed small. She did not seem to mind. "This is gravy to me," she said of the whole late-starting business. "It's a wonderful way to spend the last third of my life."
The cinema she worked in had a fixed idea of what a woman of sixty was for, and Haney filled it, precisely and without fuss, in films that mostly did not notice how well. Look for her in the reaction shots. She is usually the person the scene is actually about.
Biography
Anne Haney was an American character actress. Born Anne Ryan Thomas in Memphis, Tennessee, she earned a BA from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She began her professional career in the 1970s after raising a family, appearing in local theatre and commercials before moving to California following her husband’s death in 1980.
Haney appeared in around fifty film and television productions. She is known for her role as the social worker Mrs. Sellner in Mrs. Doubtfire (1993), Greta in Liar Liar (1997) and Mrs. Chapil in The American President (1995). She also guest-starred in episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, ER, Charmed and Curb Your Enthusiasm.
Haney died of heart failure on 26 May 2001 in Studio City, California, aged 67.
