Jeanette Miller
Jeanette Miller is an actor, born 1932.
Miller's screen record has a 42-year hole in the middle of it. She turns up as a lady in waiting in The Vagabond King in 1956, and the next film credit here is a senior citizen in The Truman Show in 1998. The extract says she worked in theatre, which is presumably where those decades went. The half that got filmed is the second one.
From her mid-sixties onward she worked constantly, playing one archetype: the very old woman. Grandma Briggs in Not Another Teen Movie, Phyllis with the cat in Corky Romano, Grandma in Stealing Harvard, Mrs. Coleman in Norbit, Gram-Gram in Four Christmases, an elderly woman in The Third Wheel, a Very Old Lady on Kitchen Confidential, Mrs. Ducketts on Carpoolers, Grandma Taylor in The Change-Up. Comedies hired her as a delivery system for one joke, and what she brought to it was patience. She never hurried a line. The pause was the joke, and she trusted it every time.
Two roles broke the pattern. Gladys Foster in Legion is the only time a film used her sweetness as a weapon, in a diner scene that is still the thing people remember about that movie. And Aunt Edie on The Middle, from 2009 to 2015, gave her six years of a real character: deaf, serene, magnificently unbothered, answering questions nobody had asked. The show eventually wrote Edie out as having died of old age.
Miller died in 2016.
Movies (11)
TV (4)
Where to start with Jeanette Miller
Go to The Middle first. Aunt Edie is the only part in this filmography written to accumulate rather than land, and the sitcom's affection for her is genuine. She is funny in a way that never requires her to be in on it.
Then Legion, where a sweet old lady orders a steak in a roadside diner and the film changes gear entirely around her. It is the one performance of hers that people quote. After that, sample the type at work: Four Christmases and Not Another Teen Movie use her as pure punchline and she plays them straight, which is why they work, and Norbit gives her a slightly gentler version. The Truman Show is barely a role at all, but it is the credit that restarted a career after four decades away, so it is worth knowing about.