Doris Roberts

The Pavement of New York

Doris Roberts was 70 years old when the general public started to see her as America's meddling mother. Before that, she spent decades working the stages and secondary sets. She was born in St. Louis in 1925 but grew up in the Bronx under her stepfather's surname. There she learned that making a living as an actress in the 1950s required a very thick skin.

In 1955 she made her Broadway debut in the play The Time of Your Life. She was not a theater star, but casting directors knew Roberts always delivered what was asked of her. She worked with figures like James Dean at the Actors Studio, and that technical training allowed her to move into television without missing a beat.

And so she did.

She alternated small roles in anthology series with character parts in New York theater. But financial stability didn't come until the industry realized that her face fit perfectly into the living room of every American home.

The Secretary Who Saved the Show

In the mid-1980s, the series Remington Steele needed a jolt to keep its audience. Roberts joined in 1983 to play Mildred Krebs, which was not part of the producers' original plan. But her chemistry with Pierce Brosnan was so obvious that the writers had to expand her contract right away.

She won her first Emmy in 1983 for a dramatic role in the series St. Elsewhere. It was a sign of what was to come, because Roberts was not only a comedy actress. She won five Emmy Awards over the course of her career.

When the casting call for Everybody Loves Raymond came in 1996, she had already seen it all in the Los Angeles studios. She beat out more than a hundred actresses for the role of Marie Barone. The producers were looking for someone who could be suffocating and charming at the same time without viewers changing the channel.

And the gamble paid off.

The Business of Longevity

She earned 250,000 dollars per episode in the final seasons of the CBS series. That salary placed her among cable television's top earners at an age when most of her generation's peers had been forgotten. She kept a work pace that wore out colleagues forty years her junior.

In 2005 the series ended after nine years of uninterrupted success. But she chose not to retire and rest at her home in the Hollywood Hills. She appeared in films such as Grandma’s Boy in 2006, where she unleashed a much naughtier side, far removed from the traditional mother figure.

Because work was her only way of understanding life.

In 2010 she appeared in the movie Madea’s Witness Protection and continued to appear steadily on television. She died in Los Angeles on April 17, 2016, in her sleep. She was 90 years old. Her last film appearance was in The Red Maple Leaf, released that same year. She left a net estate of $14 million managed by her only son.