Anne Meara

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Anne Meara (born September 20, 1929) is an American comedian and actress. She and Jerry Stiller are the parents of actor/comedian Ben and actress Amy Stiller.

Contents

Meara was born in Queens, New York to Mary and Edward J. Meara. Her mother committed suicide when Meara was eleven, and she has been in therapy since the mid-1980s. Meara was raised Catholic, but converted to Judaism six years after marrying Stiller.[1] She has long stressed that her conversion was not at Stiller's request, but because "Catholicism was dead to me", and she simply came to prefer the more "lively" character of Jewish culture. She took the conversion seriously, studying the faith in such depth that her born-Jewish husband quipped, "being married to Anne has made me more Jewish."

Meara has been married to Stiller since 1954. Both were members of the improvisational company The Compass Players (which would later become The Second City), and the pair, as the comedy team Stiller and Meara, brought many of their real-life relationship foibles to bear on their often improvised comedy routines. After some years honing the act, Stiller and Meara became regulars on The Ed Sullivan Show and other TV programs.

During the 1970s Meara and Stiller wrote and performed many radio commercials together for Blue Nun Wine.

Meara co-starred along side Carroll O'Connor and Martin Balsam in early 1980s hit sit-com Archie Bunker's Place, which was a continuation of the influential 1970s sitcom All in the Family. She played the role of Veronica Rooney, who was the Bar’s cook, for the show's first three seasons (1979-1982). She also appeared as the grandmother in the TV series ALF in the late 1980s. More recently, she has had recurring roles on the television shows Sex and the City (as Mary Brady) and The King of Queens (as Veronica). In the 2004-05 season she was on an episode of Law and Order SVU.

She is the consulting director of J.A.P. - The Princesses of Comedy, a 2007 Off-Broadway production that features live standup routines by four female Jewish comics juxtaposed with the stories of legendary performers from the 1950s and 1960s: Totie Fields, Jean Carroll, Pearl Williams, Betty Walker and Belle Barth.

  1. ^ O'Toole, Lesley. "Ben Stiller : 'Doing comedy is scary'", The Independent, 2006-12-22. Retrieved on 2006-12-22.

Advanced Search
Included Web Search Engines


Safe Search

close

Top Matching Results

Occasionally Search.com will highlight specialized results that are based on the context of your query. Examples of specialized results include specific links to news, images, or video.

Top Matching Results may highlight information from other Search.com pages, content from the CNET Network of sites, or third party content. The listings are based purely on relevance. Search.com does not receive payment for listings in this section but our partners that provide this data may get paid for listing these products.

Sponsored Links

This section contains paid listings which have been purchased by companies that want to have their sites appear for specific search terms and related content. These listings are administered, sorted and maintained by a third party and are not endorsed by Search.com.

Search Results

Search.com sends your search query to several search engines at one time and integrates the results into one list which has been sorted by relevance using Search.com's proprietary algorithm. You can customize the list of search engines included in your metasearch from the preferences.

The search engines that are used in your metasearch may allow companies to pay to have their Web sites included within the results. To view the Paid Inclusion policy for a specific search engine, please visit their Web site. Search.com does not accept payment or share revenue with any search engine partner for listings in this section.