Isabel Sanford
Isabel Sanford is an actor, born 1917.
Sanford was in her fifties before television made her a household name, which is a long apprenticeship by any standard. Before that she worked the stage and picked up whatever film parts were available to a Black character actress of her generation: the maid Tillie in Guess Who's Coming to Dinner in 1967, a small role in The Comic, Wilma in The New Centurions, Maria in Up the Sandbox. The parts were domestic workers, mostly, because that was the size of the door standing open.
All in the Family changed the arithmetic. As Louise Jefferson, the neighbour who could take Archie Bunker's bigotry head on and hand it back flattened, she gave the show its cleanest reversal: the person being insulted was plainly the smarter one in the room. The character worked well enough that she and her screen husband were moved into a series of their own in 1975, and The Jeffersons ran for a decade.
Weezy is the part that carried her, and it paid out properly. In 1981 she won the Primetime Emmy for outstanding lead actress in a comedy series, becoming the second Black actress to take a Primetime Emmy in any category, after Gail Fisher. The work afterwards was guest turns and voice jobs: narration on Reading Rainbow, appearances on The Ben Stiller Show, Pepper Ann and Teen Angel, a comic role in Jackie's Back! in 1999. She died in 2004.
Movies (6)
TV (7)
Where to start with Isabel Sanford
Start with The Jeffersons, and specifically with any scene where Louise has to manage George in public. The comedy is built on her being the only person present with a sense of proportion, and she plays that without ever going smug. Then go back to All in the Family to watch the character arrive fully formed, which is rarer than it sounds for someone who was later handed a show.
For the film work, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner is the pre-fame version, a few minutes of screen time used with real bite. Love at First Bite is the loosest thing here, a vampire comedy in which she plays a judge and quite obviously enjoys herself. If there are children in the house, her narration on Reading Rainbow is the gentlest way in.