Eda Reiss Merin
Eda Reiss Merin is an actor, born 1913.
Somebody has to play the neighbour. For six decades Eda Reiss Merin was that somebody, and her record shows what the job looked like from the inside. Born in New York in 1913, she worked on Broadway and in regional and touring theatre first, and her earliest screen credits carry no name at all: a Mrs. Klein in Where the Sidewalk Ends in 1950, a maid in Don't Bother to Knock, a fruit peddler in Lili.
The later work got names, if not much else. She is the rabbi's wife in Hester Street, Mrs. Bender in The Frisco Kid, Mrs. Jones in House, Mrs. Remington in Turner & Hooch, and Louis's neighbour in Ghostbusters, a part with no name in a film almost everybody has seen.
Two roles outlived the rest. She voiced Orddu, one of the witches in Disney's The Black Cauldron, which let her be genuinely strange for once, on the strength of a voice that had spent thirty years playing ordinary. And she played Mrs. Sturak, the babysitter in Don't Tell Mom the Babysitter's Dead, a performance so precisely and economically unpleasant that the entire premise of the film depends on the audience turning against her almost immediately. Merin died in 1998.
Movies (13)
- Ghostbusters (1984)
- The Black Cauldron (1985)
- House (1985)
- Turner & Hooch (1989)
- Don't Tell Mom the Babysitter's Dead (1991)
- Don't Bother to Knock (1952)
- The Frisco Kid (1979)
- Flying Leathernecks (1951)
- Lili (1953)
- Where the Sidewalk Ends (1950)
- Hester Street (1975)
- To Be or Not to Be (1983)
- Once Upon a Halloween (2005)
TV (3)
Where to start with Eda Reiss Merin
Begin with Don't Tell Mom the Babysitter's Dead, the obvious entry and the correct one. Her scenes are short and she makes every one of them count, establishing the whole comedy in very little screen time through nothing but disapproval.
The Black Cauldron is the other essential, and the more interesting performance. It is Disney's strangest animated feature, the witches are its best sequence, and her voice work there bears no resemblance to the naturalism of the live-action parts.
After that, treat it as a spotting game. Ghostbusters and Turner & Hooch are the ones you have almost certainly seen without noticing her. Hester Street is the real film on the list, small, black-and-white and excellent. House is the horror comedy pick, and Where the Sidewalk Ends takes you back to 1950 and an uncredited start.