Christina Pickles

Christina Pickles is an English actress born on 17 February 1935 in Halifax, West Riding of Yorkshire. She began studying at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London at age 14, where her classmates included Albert Finney, Peter O'Toole, and Brian Bedford. After completing her training, she relocated to New York City in the late 1950s, initially sharing accommodations with fellow RADA graduate Donald Moffat and his wife.

Pickles launched her professional acting career in 1961 with a production of Look Back in Anger at the Arena Stage in Washington, D.C. She subsequently performed in Measure for Measure as part of Joe Papp's Shakespeare in the Park, and won the lead role in George Devine's The Way of the World despite having originally auditioned for the maid's part. Her Broadway debut came in 1964 with A Severed Head, and her stage work over the following decade encompassed productions including Inadmissible Evidence, You Can't Take It with You, War and Peace, The Misanthrope, Hamlet, Cock-A-Doodle Dandy, Who's Who in Hell, and Sherlock Holmes. Her Broadway career spanned the years 1964 to 1974, with Sherlock Holmes following in 1975.

Concurrent with her stage work, Pickles entered television, taking on the role of Linell Conway on the NBC daytime drama Guiding Light from 1970 to 1972, a role she reprised in 2007. She later played Countess Elena dePoulignac on the NBC soap opera Another World from 1977 to 1979. Her early film appearances included Seizure in 1974 and Rush It in 1977.

Following her move from New York City to Los Angeles, Pickles was cast as Nurse Helen Rosenthal in the NBC medical drama St. Elsewhere, a role she held for the series' entire run from 1982 to 1988. The performance earned her five nominations for the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Drama Series. During this period she was also romantically linked to actor Herbert Edelman, who played her significant other on the same series, a relationship that continued until his death in 1996.

Pickles went on to accumulate an extensive list of television credits, including recurring and guest appearances on Family Ties, Who's the Boss?, In the Heat of the Night, Matlock, The Nanny, Murder She Wrote, Touched by an Angel, and The People Next Door, a short-lived CBS sitcom from 1989. From 1994 to 2003, she portrayed Judy Geller, the mother of Ross and Monica Geller, in the NBC sitcom Friends, appearing across the series' ten-season run. That role brought her a 1995 Primetime Emmy nomination for Outstanding Guest Actress in a Comedy Series. She played the mother of Harmon Rabb in the CBS drama JAG from 1998 to 2000, and starred in the Fox comedy-drama Get Real from 1999 to 2000. In the 2000s she appeared in How I Met Your Mother as Lily Aldrin's grandmother, and guest-starred on The Division, Medium, and Childrens Hospital. In 2016 she was cast in the ABC drama pilot The Death of Eva Sofia Valdez.

Her film work includes Masters of the Universe (1987), Legends of the Fall (1994) directed by Edward Zwick, Grace of My Heart (1996), Baz Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet (1996), The Wedding Singer (1998), Sol Goode (2003), George of the Jungle 2 (2003), and Atlas Shrugged: Part I (2011). In 2018, Pickles won the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Actress in a Short Form Comedy or Drama Series for her work in the Vimeo series Break a Hip, her seventh Emmy nomination overall and her first in 23 years.

In her personal life, Pickles was married to producer and director Victor Lobl for 23 years before the couple divorced in 1985. In 2005 she married Australian-American journalist Ian Masters.