Carol Kane on Her Movie Comeback at 72: ‘I’m Having a Ball!’

Fifty years ago at 22, Carol Kane was on unemployment. Then she played an 1896 Russian immigrant in New York in Hester Street (1975), earned an Oscar nomination, and created multiple iconic movie roles: a bank-teller hostage opposite Al Pacino in Dog Day Afternoon, Woody Allen’s high-IQ ex in Annie Hall, Billy Crystal’s wife in The Princess Bride, Granny in Addams Family Values, the soft-voiced, two-fisted fairy princess who yanks Bill Murray’s nose in Scrooged. She won two Emmys as Andy Kaufman’s wife, Simka Dahblitz-Gravas, on Taxi.

When movies got dumber, she fell off the A-list. But at 72, she’s back as a lead in Between the Temples, a quirky comedy that hearkens back to the films of the 1970s, especially Harold and Maude. She plays Carla, a music teacher who decides to get her bat mitzvah in her 70s, studying Hebrew with a grieving, widowed cantor (Jason Schwartzman) who was her music student in his childhood. They light up each other’s lives. Kane tells AARP about her recent career renaissance.

AARP readers are going to love one line from Between the Temples: “Welcome to the next part of your life — from here on in what you do, what you are, it’s up to you, and only you.”

Jason Schwartzman says it in the movie and also in real life. He hopes that's what people take away from the movie: that you can make of your life what you want to make of it — if you follow your heart. It’s not simple, and it’s not easy, but it belongs to you.

The movie is inspired by director Nathan Silver’s mother, who really did get her bat mitzvah in her 70s. Your mom is a music teacher — are you inspired by her?

Yes. My mom, Joy Kane, is 97, still composing and teaching music. She’s not a confident person. But she had the courage to start her life completely over again at 55. She moved to Paris, lived in a teeny, teeny, tiny hotel room with a toilet down the hall; you had to make a reservation to take a bath. And this woman from Cleveland became a master teacher of Dalcroze eurhythmics, and she wrote seven books.

(Left to right) Andy Kaufman and Carol Kane in "Taxi."

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Your character, Carla, has ethereal gentleness and also a steely core. Since the movie was heavily improvised, does it have more of your personality in it than, say, Taxi, which was tightly scripted?

It was improvised around a solid notion of what each scene had to accomplish. So yes, that definitely means there’s more of me in this than almost anything, because a lot of it just comes out from my mouth, from between my temples.

(Left to right) Carol Kane and Billy Crystal in "The Princess Bride."

20thCentFox/Everett Collection

It’s a comedy in a modern idiom, but isn’t it reminiscent of the ’70s, when movies could afford risk and everything seemed so open?

I agree with you completely there. It’s all kinds of risk-taking in every second, of every sort.