Laraine Newman

The Girl of a Thousand Faces Who Walked Away from the Spotlight

Laraine Newman never expected that a mime class in Paris with Marcel Marceau would become the foundation of modern American comedy. She returned to Los Angeles and co-founded The Groundlings with her sister Tracy when she was barely nineteen. She had an observational ability that bordered on the pathological, and that caught the attention of talent scouts.

Lorne Michaels saw her perform in one of those improv shows and didn't need any more auditions. In 1975, he signed her for the original cast of Saturday Night Live. She became one of the so-called Not Ready for Prime Time Players, alongside names like Bill Murray and Gilda Radner.

She was the youngest in the group.

Her characters, like Connie Conehead and the iconic Valley Girl Sheri, set the tone for the show over five years. But the pace of New York and the pressure of live television took their toll. Newman struggled with eating disorders and a drug addiction that she hid behind the makeup of her characterizations. In 1980, she decided to leave the show just as it reached the peak of its cultural influence.

The Unexpected Refuge After the Storm

The move to film wasn't the smooth ride many expected. She appeared in movies like Stardust Memories by Woody Allen in 1980 or Perfect in 1985 alongside John Travolta. But leading roles remained out of reach, as the industry didn't know where to place her outside of sketch comedy.

And then the phone stopped ringing.

In the late 1980s, her career took a turn no one predicted. She discovered that her talent for voices and accents was a goldmine in the animation industry. She no longer needed the camera to focus on her to work. In 1991, she began voicing characters on Rugrats, and that changed her financial stability forever.

The industry wrote her off far too soon.

She lent her voice to major projects such as Finding Nemo in 2003 and Cars in 2006. She became one of the most in-demand voice actresses in Burbank. She worked on Despicable Me and the Shrek franchise without most audiences knowing that the same woman who revolutionized television in the 1970s was behind those characters.

The Voice Acting Business and Her Role

Her professional maturity took her away from the TV set and toward writing and commentary. She began contributing to outlets like The New Yorker and McSweeney’s, offering a sharp take on the profession. In 2021, she published her memoir in audio format, titled May You Live in Interesting Times (Que vivas tiempos interesantes).

But she never fully abandoned work in front of the microphone. In 2023, she appeared in the series Uprooted and kept her presence in big-budget animated productions. She has appeared in more than 100 titles as a voice actress since she made a clear choice to put on-camera work aside as her top priority.

So her survival in the industry depended not on her face but on her voice. In 2024, she provided the voices of various supporting characters in the Pixar production Inside Out 2.