Judith Roberts
Two roles thirty years apart define the page. In Eraserhead (1977) Roberts is the Beautiful Girl Across the Hall, a presence rather than a character, and one of the images people carry out of that film for the rest of their lives. In Dead Silence (2007) she plays Mary Shaw, the ventriloquist the whole story is built around, and does most of the work with stillness and a fixed expression.
Between and after those, she has been steadily employed as the actor a director hires when a scene needs someone who is unsettling without doing anything. John Cassavetes used her early, in Minnie and Moskowitz (1971). Woody Allen put her in Stardust Memories (1980) singing "Three Little Words". She is Judge Shaw in Death Sentence (2007) and appears in The Nanny Diaries the same year, then plays Joe's mother in You Were Never Really Here (2017), which is the warmest thing on this list and the one where you can see her act rather than haunt.
Her stage career and her run as Erica Taslitz on Orange Is the New Black are not among the credits listed here. The recent work has stayed in horror: Constance in The Last Thing Mary Saw (2021) and Jolene July in the series NOS4A2. It is a long, patient career built almost entirely out of small parts that directors remember.
Movies (10)
TV (2)
Where to start with Judith Roberts
Eraserhead is the obvious start and still the right one: almost no dialogue, and she remains the thing people describe when they try to describe the film. Follow it with Dead Silence, where she plays Mary Shaw and carries an entire horror premise on her face. You Were Never Really Here is the one to watch if you want acting rather than atmosphere; her scenes as Joe's mother supply the film's only soft light. The Last Thing Mary Saw is slower and colder, good if period horror appeals to you. Completists should look at Minnie and Moskowitz and Stardust Memories to see what a New York character actor's working life looked like before horror claimed her.