On-camera Roles
Questel has played a number of small parts, including appearing with Rudy Vallee as Betty Boop in the 1931 short Musical Justice (1931) and as a nurse in The Musical Doctor in 1932.
In 1961 she was seen as a middle-aged bride in Jerry Lewis' It's Only Money, one of Fanny Brice's mother's card-playing friends at the start of the film Funny Girl in 1968, and as the "Jewish Mama from Hell" in Woody Allen's New York Stories in 1989 in Woody's segment titled "Oedipus Wrecks"; she had earlier sung the song "Chameleon Days" on the soundtrack for Allen's film Zelig in 1983. Her last non-voice appearance was as the elderly Aunt Bethany in 1989's National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation.
In 1973, Questel had a role in the short-lived ABC television sitcom The Corner Bar, but she achieved perhaps her greatest visibility in television commercials, notably playing "Aunt Bluebell" in ads for Scott Towels, but also appeared in spots for Playtex, Folger's Coffee and others. She also appeared on panel shows and in daytime soap operas.
Questel had a withered arm; in her on-camera film appearances, she was usually photographed with elbows bent and both hands at her waist or holding an object in the crook of her elbow to make it less obvious that one arm was shorter and smaller than the other.
Read more about this topic: Mae Questel
Famous quotes containing the word roles:
“It was always the work that was the gyroscope in my life. I don’t know who could have lived with me. As an architect you’re absolutely devoured. A woman’s cast in a lot of roles and a man isn’t. I couldn’t be an architect and be a wife and mother.”
—Eleanore Kendall Pettersen (b. 1916)