Tovah Feldshuh

Tovah Feldshuh is a stage actor who does television, and the order matters. Fifty years on Broadway have brought her four Tony nominations, and her earliest screen credits here come from the same period: Gibbsville in 1976, then Holocaust in 1978, the landmark miniseries that earned her one of her two Emmy nominations. The second came for Law and Order.

Her specialty is a certain kind of formidable woman, frequently a mother, always with more going on than the scene strictly requires. Judy Stein in Kissing Jessica Stein is the version people quote. Naomi Bunch in Crazy Ex-Girlfriend is the same archetype sharpened into musical comedy, and Bina Roklov in Nobody Wants This is the recent, more restrained reading. Played badly, these parts are caricature. Feldshuh keeps locating the specific grievance that turns each one into a person.

Film has used her as a reliable character actor for decades: Brewster's Millions, Daniel, A Walk on the Moon, The Believer, She's Funny That Way, Armageddon Time. Her run as Deanna Monroe on The Walking Dead from 2015 to 2016 shows up on this page only through the retrospective The Walking Dead: The Return. At a point where many actors slow down, she has Tuner, M.I.A. and a 2026 project called TOVAH in which she appears as herself.