Julie Deborah Kavner (born September 7, 1950) is an American Emmy Award-winning actress, perhaps best known for providing the voice of Marge Simpson on the animated television show The Simpsons, acting in several Woody Allen-directed films, and playing Brenda Morgenstern on Rhoda in the 1970s.
Kavner was born in Los Angeles, California, the daughter of Rose (née Steinbock), a family counselor, and David Kavner, a furniture manufacturer. She grew up entirely in Southern California, a fact that comes as a surprise to many people who identify her with her role as New Yorker Brenda Morgenstern and who peg her creaky, somewhat nasally voice as sounding "East Coast". Kavner went to Beverly Hills High School and studied Theater Arts, graduating with honors from San Diego State University in 1971. Her daughter was born in 1984.
In 1975, she received a nomination for her starring role in the daytime special, The Girl Who Couldn’t Lose. Kavner is one of the many actors who are frequently cast in Woody Allen movies. She is frequently seen in supporting roles. Kavner played the role of Brenda Morgenstern in the TV show Rhoda. After Rhoda ended, Kavner moved into film. She has appeared in several Woody Allen films including Radio Days (along with Michael Tucker, Mia Farrow, and Diane Wiest); New York Stories (opposite Allen himself); Alice (opposite Farrow again); Shadows and Fog (again opposite Allen); Hannah and Her Sisters (opposite Allen again), as well as Deconstructing Harry (opposite Richard Benjamin and Julia Louis-Dreyfus). She also appeared in Awakenings (opposite Robin Williams and Robert De Niro), Revenge of the Stepford Wives (1980), and the 1992 Nora Ephron comedy drama This Is My Life. This particular role was intended as her breakout role, but it got middling reviews and did not do well at the box office. Since then Kavner has largely limited herself to supporting roles and voice over work. Most recently, she appeared as Adam Sandler's mother in Click. She has also worked with Tracey Ullman on Tracey's primetime TV comedy show, as well as Tracey Takes On.
Onstage, she has played under Burt Reynolds’s direction in Two for the Seesaw with Martin Sheen at Reynolds’s Dinner Theatre in Jupiter, Florida. In Canada, she starred in It Had To Be You, written by Renee Taylor and Joseph Bologna.
In Disney's The Lion King 1½ (a.k.a. The Lion King 3: Hakuna Matata), Kavner voiced Timon's mother.
In The Simpsons, Kavner provides the voices for Marge Simpson, Patty Bouvier, Selma Bouvier, Jacqueline Ingrid "Jackie" Bouvier and Gladys Bouvier. She has been known to refuse to perform any of her characters' voices in public. Kavner even goes as far as to not allow any film footage of her doing the characters from The Simpsons to be captured. The reason for this is because she contorts her face and doesn't want people to see it. She did however perform Marge's voice on Inside the Actor's Studio, but during the performance the television audience saw only clips of Marge from the series over her voice. To perform Marge's voice, Kavner raises her voice by about an octave, and roughens it up a bit; to do Patty and Selma, she lowers her voice an octave, and roughens it up a lot.
Series creator Matt Groening said, "My original idea about Marge's family was they were utterly joyless. The original note I gave to Julie was that they suck the life out of everything they see'".
