Joanna Merlin

Joanna Merlin spent her working life on both sides of the audition table. She was an actress and a casting director, she taught in the graduate acting programme at New York University, and she wrote two books about the craft, which is a rarer combination than it sounds. Most people who cast do not perform, and most people who perform have never had to sit on the other side of hundreds of auditions for a single part.

The stage came first, and the peak of it was the original Broadway production of Fiddler on the Roof. She worked with Stephen Sondheim. Screen work started early, with Jethro's daughter in Cecil B. DeMille's The Ten Commandments in 1956, and then the credits listed here go quiet for the best part of twenty years before resuming in the 1970s and 1980s.

What she got, over and over, was the mother, the grandmother, the landlady, the neighbour: Mrs. Rosen in Baby It's You, Mrs. Arujo in Mystic Pizza, Grandma Shapiro in The Wackness, Estelle Ward in Class Action. From 2000 to 2011 she was Judge Lena Petrovsky on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, presiding over a decade of the show with the exact unimpressed authority the part required and nothing more. Merlin, born in 1931, died in 2023.