Kelly Bishop

Watch what Kelly Bishop does with a line nobody else at the table would dare say. She does not lean into it. She sets it down, smiles a little, lifts an eyebrow and goes back to her drink, so the person she has just cut takes a moment to notice. In An Unmarried Woman (1978) she is Elaine, the friend who gets the sharpest lines in Paul Mazursky's script and delivers every one of them from behind a glass. We laughed at all of them and were quietly glad not to be sitting next to her, because Bishop never plays the wit as a turn; it is simply how this woman talks, and she would talk that way to us.

The timing comes from somewhere. Bishop was a ballet dancer first, in the Radio City Music Hall corps at 18, then in Broadway choruses from the late 1960s, and it was a chorus that made her: she originated Sheila in A Chorus Line in 1975. Film followed, and for a decade the industry knew exactly what to do with her, which was not much. "I was always the sexy tootsie," she has said: the girlfriend on the side, never the wife, never the mother. That changed with Dirty Dancing (1987), where she stepped into the part of Marjorie Houseman during production and played a mother for the first time.

The part that fixed her in most people's minds came at 56. Emily Gilmore, across seven seasons of Gilmore Girls (2000–2007) and its 2016 revival, is a wealthy, status-conscious matriarch written by Amy Sherman-Palladino at a speed most actors could not keep up with, and Bishop's precision is what lets her stay ahead of it without ever looking hurried. What she adds, and what the writing needs, is the fear under the authority: a woman who runs every room she enters and is not sure anyone in it likes her. Edward Herrmann, her co-star for the run, is who she plays it against. Sherman-Palladino brought her back as Benedetta in The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel (2017), and she has kept working into the 2020s, in Shrinking among others.

The criticism, and it is fair, is that she was typecast twice: first as the woman the husband was seeing, then as the woman whose house the husband could not afford. Both are supporting parts, and hers has been a career of them. On the evidence of Elaine, who is the best company in a picture that belongs to Jill Clayburgh, someone missed a trick. Casting directors will go on sending her the well-dressed mother with the drink and the eyebrow. She will go on doing it, and doing it well. We would still like to see what happens when the glass is taken away.