Joanna Merlin
Birth : 1931-07-16, Chicago, Illinois, USA
History
Joanna Merlin (born Joann Ratner; July 15, 1931) is an American actress and casting director who has worked with Stephen Sondheim and starred in the original Broadway production of Fiddler on the Roof. She has written two acting guides and is a faculty member of New York University's graduate acting program. In recent years, she has become known for her recurring role on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit as Judge Lena Petrovsky.
Joann Ratner, who later took her mother's maiden name, was born in Chicago, Illinois, to Toni Merlin and Harry Ratner, a Jewish grocer. Her family also included her older sister Harriet Glickman (1926-2020) who would go on to gain recognition for having helped persuade Charles Schulz to add a black character to his Peanuts strip. Merlin first acted on stage at age 11, joining a community theatre production, Too Many Marys. Merlin graduated from UCLA and later studied under Michael Chekhov, learning his world-renowned acting technique. She has been described as the last student of Michael Chekhov who is still alive and teaching.
Merlin made her first screen appearance in Cecil B. DeMille's film The Ten Commandments in 1956. Five years later, she made her Broadway debut in Becket before playing Tzeitel in Harold Prince's production of Fiddler on the Roof. She left the cast of Fiddler on the Roof before the end of its tour to take care of her two small children but Harold Prince gave her the opportunity to become involved in casting with a more flexible schedule. Company was the first musical for which Merlin served as the casting director. She was also in charge of casting for such plays as Follies, Evita and Sweeney Todd.
In 1986, she served as casting director for the John Carpenter film, Big Trouble in Little China.
After making appearances in several feature films, including the movie Fame, in which she played Miss Olivia Berg, a classical dance teacher; Merlin appeared in the NBC crime drama Law & Order in 1992 as a defense attorney. Like many actors from that show, she went on to play other characters in the Law & Order franchise - another defense attorney in the original show and a more recurring role as Judge Lena Petrovsky, a judge who was very stern, by-the-book, and has scolded or sanctioned, at various times, ADAs Casey Novak (Diane Neal) and Alexandra Cabot (Stephanie March) and Detective (now Lieutenant) Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay), in its first spin-off Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. In the latter role, she appeared in every season between the years 2000 and 2011.
In 2001, Joanna Merlin wrote Auditioning: An Actor-Friendly Guide and in 2007, shared her knowledge of the theatre industry in the instructional video Master Classes in the Michael Chekhov Technique. She teaches in New York University's graduate acting program at the Tisch School of the Arts and in 1999, founded the Michael Chekhov Association where she teaches acting workshops.
Source: Article "Joanna Merlin" from Wikipedia in English, licensed under CC-BY-SA 3.0.
Miriam
Malcolm and Lily try to start their lives as they watch Malcolm's grandparents' fall apart.
Mrs. Rainsferd
On the night of 16 July 1942, ten year old Sarah and her parents are being arrested and transported to the Velodrome d'Hiver in Paris where thousands of other jews are being sent to get deported. Sarah however managed to lock her little brother in a closet just before the police entered their apartment. Sixty years later, Julia Jarmond, an American journalist in Paris, gets the assignment to write an article about this raid, a black page in the history of France. She starts digging archives and through Sarah's file discovers a well kept secret about her own in-laws.
Grandma Shapiro
Set in New York City in the sweltering summer, The Wackness tells the story of a troubled teenage drug dealer, who trades pot for therapy sessions with a drug-addled psychiatrist. Things get more complicated when he falls for one of his classmates, who just happens to be the doctor's daughter. This is a coming-of-age story about sex, drugs, music and what it takes to be a man.
Joan Kaufman
Washington, D.C. psychologist Carol Bennell and her colleague Dr. Ben Driscoll are the only two people on Earth who are aware of an epidemic running rampant through the city. They discover an alien virus aboard a crashed space shuttle that transforms anyone who comes into contact with it into unfeeling drones while they sleep. Carol realizes her son holds the key to stopping the spread of the plague and she races to find him before it is too late.
Emily
A failed New Jersey inventor embarks on a career as a standup comic, turns to drink, and labors to keep his family together.
Cindy's Mother
Would you be willing to walk away from everyone and everything you've ever known in exchange for your safety? This is the question facing career criminal Bobby "Bats" Batton (Tom Sizemore); on the outs with the mob and facing prosecution for a number of serious crimes, Batton is offered a deal by the FBI in which he will be given immunity in exchange for testifying against his former partners. However, Batton will have to join the Federal Witness Protection Program, which means that he, his wife, and his children will never again see their friends and family.
Teresa Messinger
When guardian angel Seth - who invisibly watches over the citizens of Los Angeles - becomes captivated by Maggie, a strong-willed heart surgeon, he ponders trading in his pure, otherworldly existence for a mortal life with his beloved. The couple embarks on a tender but forbidden romance spanning heaven and Earth.
Jewel
Drama (and prospective pilot) about the lives of three women who work in the New York City DA's office: one a brilliant prosecutor of high-profile cases whose husband is shot and killed in an armed robbery; a second, her tough, bitter, chain-smoking, boozing, wheelchair-bound former mentor; a third, a Latina who is an ambitious legal intern.
Doris
Mildred and Doris are two middle-aged white women, from very different backgrounds, who become lovers and set up house together. Film explores the pleasures and uncertainties of later-life emotional attachment and lesbian identity in a culture that glorifies youth and heterosexual romance.
Guendolina
It's a hot summer day in 1933 in South Philly, where 12-year old Gennaro lives with his widowed mom and his ailing grandpa, who sits outside holding tight to his last quarter, which he's promised to Gennaro and which Gennaro would like to have to buy a ticket to the plush new movie theater. But grandpa's not ready to pass on the quarter or pass on to his final reward: he has some unfinished business with a woman from his past, and he enlists Gennaro to act as his emissary.
Casting
His wife having recently died, Thomas Jefferson accepts the post of United States ambassador to pre-revolutionary France, though he finds it difficult to adjust to life in a country where the aristocracy subjugates an increasingly restless peasantry. In Paris, he becomes smitten with cultured artist Maria Cosway, but, when his daughter visits from Virginia accompanied by her attractive slave, Sally Hemings, Jefferson's attentions are diverted.
Loretta
Electrician Gus gets the chance to fulfil a childhood dream by buying an old bowling-alley with some of his friends, but first he must find his ex-wife a new husband so he can stop paying alimony.
Rose Profaci
The story of Rosalie Bonnano, the daughter of a powerful New York Mafia boss who married the son of her father's rival, another powerful New York Mafia boss.
Casting
A collection of fairy tale characters head into the woods, and soon learn that fairy tales don't end at "happily ever after." This rendition of Stephen Sondheim's Tony Award-winning musical was recorded on the stage with its original all-star Broadway cast. Originally broadcast as part of "American Playhouse" on PBS (season ten, episode one).
Estelle Ward
A liberal activist lawyer alienated his daughter Maggie years ago when she discovered his many affairs. Now a conservative corporate lawyer, Maggie agrees to go up against her father in court. To gain promotion, she must defend an auto manufacturer against charges that their explosion-prone station wagons are unsafe. As her mother begs for peace, Maggie takes on her dad in a trial that turns increasingly personal and nasty.
Casting
Set during World War II, an upper-class family begins to fall apart due to the conservative nature of the patriarch and the progressive values of his children.
Dr. Bromberg
A recently appointed black police commissioner is killed. So, Frank Janek is assigned to investigate.
Mrs. Arujo
Three teenage girls come of age while working at a pizza parlor in Mystic, Connecticut.
Bag Lady
A research team finds a mysterious cylinder in a deserted church. If opened, it could mean the end of the world.
Casting
A dramatic history of Pu Yi, the last of the Emperors of China, from his lofty birth and brief reign in the Forbidden City, the object of worship by half a billion people; through his abdication, his decline and dissolute lifestyle; his exploitation by the invading Japanese, and finally to his obscure existence as just another peasant worker in the People's Republic.
Casting
When trucker Jack Burton agreed to take his friend, Wang Chi, to pick up his fiancee at the airport, he never expected to get involved in a supernatural battle between good and evil. Wang's fiancee has emerald green eyes, which make her a perfect target for immortal sorcerer Lo Pan—who must marry a girl with green eyes so he can regain his physical form.
Schanberg's Sister
The real-life story of a friendship between two journalists, an American and a Cambodian, during the bloody Khmer Rouge takeover of Cambodia in 1975, which led to the death of 2-3 million Cambodians during the next four years, until Pol Pot's regime was toppled by the intervening Vietnamese in 1979.
An Argentinian newspaper publisher is imprisoned by his government for dissent.
Mrs. Rosen
In a 1966 New Jersey high school, Jill and new student Sheik from the other side of the tracks make their way in a first love romance.
Mrs. Sturgis
It's an extraordinarily touching true-story about Terry Jean Moore, the determined, independent and young woman who is imprisoned for 7 years on account of a "five dollar" robbery. In the prison she will be pregnant by a jailer and she has to fight for bear and keep her child.
Inez Marin
Aspiring teen folk singer is torn whether to continue her singing or to accept an educational scholarship.
Miss Berg
A chronicle of the lives of several teenagers who attend a New York high school for students gifted in the performing arts.
Nan Riley
Michael Learned plays Mary Benjamin, a recently widowed woman who, confronted with her son's departure for college, decides to resume her career as a head nurse in a Manhattan hospital in this pilot movie for the short-lived TV series.
Nurse Pierce
Joe Gideon is at the top of the heap, one of the most successful directors and choreographers in musical theater. But he can feel his world slowly collapsing around him - his obsession with work has almost destroyed his personal life, and only his bottles of pills keep him going.
Mrs. Farelli
Family members face hard decisions about the care of their elderly father who needs constant care and can no longer safely live alone, which particularly affects the eldest son's life, placing his impending marriage in jeopardy.
Jake's Landlady
A Russian emigre prides himself on the way he's molded himself into a real Yankee in the USA, though the world he lives in, New York's Lower East Side in the late 19th century, is almost exclusively populated by other Jewish immigrants. When his wife finally arrives in the New World, however, she has a lot of assimilating to do.
Based on Graham Greene's novel about a flawed but devoted priest in 1930s Mexico who attempts to perform his duties while eluding a police lieutenant determined to capture him.
Josie
A photographer struggles to make enough money to marry his fiancee, who is starting to believe he's delaying their marriage deliberately.
Jethro's Daughter
Escaping death, a Hebrew infant is raised in a royal household to become a prince. Upon discovery of his true heritage, Moses embarks on a personal quest to reclaim his destiny as the leader and liberator of the Hebrew people.
