Colleen Camp
Colleen Camp is an actor, born 1953.
Camp has appeared in films continuously since the early 1970s, which is a rarer achievement than a famous decade. She started in bit parts, took a lead in The Swinging Cheerleaders in 1974, played Julie in Battle for the Planet of the Apes, and turned up as Miss May, one of the Playmates airlifted into the war in Apocalypse Now, before most of her eventual audience was born.
What she is good at is arriving with a whole person already assembled. She is on screen for very little of Clue, and Yvette the maid is still one of the four or five things everybody can quote from it. She is Mrs. Vanderhoff in Wayne's World, Tracy Flick's mother in Election, Connie Kowalski in Die Hard: With a Vengeance, Brenda in American Hustle. None of those parts runs to more than a handful of scenes. All of them land, and the landing is the whole skill.
She produces as well, which is the other half of a long working life in this business, and she has not stopped: Amsterdam, The Deliverance, Bride Hard. Fifty years of small parts is its own kind of career, and hers is one of the most complete versions of it in American film.
Movies (77)
- Game of Death (1978)
- Knock Knock (2015)
- Apocalypse Now (1979)
- Die Hard: With a Vengeance (1995)
- Sliver (1993)
- Clue (1985)
- American Hustle (2013)
- Speed 2: Cruise Control (1997)
- Bride Hard (2025)
- Trapped (2002)
- Wayne's World (1992)
- Amsterdam (2022)
- Battle for the Planet of the Apes (1973)
- Material Girls (2006)
- The House with a Clock in Its Walls (2018)
- Spenser Confidential (2020)
- Police Academy 2: Their First Assignment (1985)
- Above Suspicion (2019)
- The Deliverance (2024)
- Cirque du Freak: The Vampire's Assistant (2009)
- Police Academy 4: Citizens on Patrol (1987)
- Valley Girl (1983)
- 9 Bullets (2022)
- Four Christmases (2008)
- Spenser Confidential 2
- Mainstream (2021)
- Election (1999)
- Someone Like You... (2001)
- Palo Alto (2014)
- In Good Company (2004)
TV (6)
Where to start with Colleen Camp
Everyone lands here through Clue, and rightly. It is a farce that only works at high precision, Camp plays the maid, and her scenes are pitched at exactly the speed of Tim Curry's, which is the highest compliment available in that film.
Apocalypse Now is the historic one, a few minutes in the middle of a legendary production. Election is the sharpest of her small modern parts: as Tracy Flick's mother she has about three scenes and hands you an entire theory of where Tracy came from. Valley Girl is the early-eighties one worth revisiting, Wayne's World and Die Hard: With a Vengeance are blockbuster cameos she makes memorable, and American Hustle shows her still doing the same trick for David O. Russell forty years later.