Julie Kavner

Kavner was famous long before The Simpsons. She played Brenda Morgenstern on Rhoda, the younger sister of Valerie Harper's title character, and won a Primetime Emmy for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series for it. That voice, low and cracked and unmistakable, was already the joke and the warmth of the part.

The Simpsons began as shorts on The Tracey Ullman Show, where she was a cast member, and she has voiced Marge ever since. She also does most of Marge's family: Jacqueline Bouvier, the sisters Patty and Selma, and Eunice, which means one performer supplies three generations of women who sound related and nothing alike. Marge is the harder job of the two registers. The sisters are pure comic sandpaper, while Marge has to be sincere in a show built on irony, and the series only has a heart because that sincerity never breaks.

Her live-action career belongs largely to Woody Allen, who used her in six films from the mid-1980s on, most memorably as the mother in Radio Days and as Gail in Hannah and Her Sisters. Outside that she is the nurse in Awakenings, the harried stand-up mother in Nora Ephron's This Is My Life, and Lucy in Forget Paris. The through line is the same in animation and in live action: nobody plays tired affection better.