Julie Kavner

Emmy Award winner Julie Kavner is the voice of Marge Simpson and her sisters, Patty and Selma Bouvier, on The Simpsons.

Two years out of college, Kavner began her professional career playing sardonic, overweight Brenda Morgenstern on the TV sitcom Rhoda (1974-78). With her wry, sarcastic delivery, her raspy and unique voice and her self-deprecating humor, Kavner has carved a niche as a likeable second banana, playing scrappy underdogs, working women and supportive wives in such films as Bad Medicine, Surrender and Awakenings; TV movies like No Other Love and Revenge of the Stepford Wives; and Neil Simon’s Jake’s Women. A Woody Allen regular, she has acted in seven of his films, including Hannah and Her Sisters (1986) and Alice (1990), and is reputedly the only actress to play his mother (in Radio Days, 1987), his girlfriend (in New York Stories, 1989), his fiancée (in Shadows and Fog, 1992) and his wife (Don’t Drink the Water, 1994). Other film credits include Forget Paris, Dr. Doolittle, The Lion King 1½ and the Adam Sandler movie Click.

Kavner displayed her gifts for mimicry on The Tracey Ullman Show and Tracey Takes On with such diverse characters as a Soviet circus performer and a bisexual talent agent before she was cast in her first starring role as a funny cosmetics saleswoman and mother-turned-successful-professional-comedienne in Nora Ephron’s comedy This Is My Life. Kavner also shone in another prominent role, as an extremely, if inadvertently, honest box-office analyst who becomes involved with a film producer (Albert Brooks) in I’ll Do Anything.

Kavner’s New York theater credits include God’s Heart at Lincoln Center, The Mineolla Twins, Mizlansky/Zilinsky or Schmucks, the two-character play Particular Friendships and The Vagina Monologues, which she opened in New York and Los Angeles.

In July 2007, Kavner starred in the feature film The Simpsons Movie. A California native, she lives in Los Angeles.