Celia Weston

Celia Weston was born in Spartanburg, South Carolina in 1951, and her first sustained job was a sitcom: Jolene Hunnicutt, the waitress she played on Alice through the first half of the eighties. That could easily have been the entire career. Instead she became one of the most-used character actresses in American film, with supporting parts in more than forty of them.

Her instrument is a Southern voice and the courtesy that comes with it, and she uses it two ways. In one mode the manners are real and the warmth underneath is the point, as in Junebug, where the kindness she plays is the only functioning thing in the household. In the other the politeness is the weapon, delivered with a smile that nobody in the scene can object to without looking rude. Mona Lauder in Far from Heaven is the sharpest example of that.

The dramatic work is where the range shows. She was nominated for an Independent Spirit Award for Dead Man Walking, and In the Bedroom, The Talented Mr. Ripley and Snow Falling on Cedars all use her for grief or grievance rather than comedy.

She is still working, mostly in comedies now, from Modern Family and Vice Principals through to recent studio films. It is a career of more than forty years built almost entirely out of other people's mothers, aunts and neighbours, and she has never once phoned one in.