Gail Boggs

Gail Charlene Boggs, born August 10, 1951, in Montclair, New Jersey, is an American actress whose career has spanned Broadway, film, and television. The daughter of Willie Boggs, a tree surgeon, and Alice, a dietitian, Boggs described harboring ambitions of a Broadway career from an early age.

Her professional acting debut came in 1971, when she was cast as Silvia in a touring production of a pop-rock adaptation of Shakespeare's The Two Gentlemen of Verona, which performed in Australia. Following that engagement, she signed with the William Morris Agency. Her Broadway work between 1971 and 1978 included Mother Earth, which played at the Belasco Theatre in 1972; Candide, in which she performed the roles of Penitente, Whore, and Houri at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1974; Jesus Christ Superstar; and Ain't Misbehavin', which she joined in 1979. Additional stage credits include Derek Walcott's Ti-Jean and His Brothers in 1972, Elizabeth Swados's Lullabye and Goodnight, in which she played Velvet Puppy in 1982, and Cancelled Lives: Letters from the Inside in 1993.

During the mid-1970s, Boggs built a parallel career as a session vocalist and percussionist. A chance encounter with Todd Rundgren at a Manhattan intersection, as she recounted in a 1975 interview, led to her singing backup alongside Darcy Miller and Laura Nyro on Felix Cavaliere's second album, Destiny. She subsequently contributed vocals to Hall and Oates's War Babies and to two Carly Simon albums, Spy and Come Upstairs. During the same period, Boggs performed as a vocalist and percussionist with the group the Striders, alongside Joel "Bishop" O'Brien, an alumnus of the Original Flying Machine, and Robbie Dupree. She also sang with David Sancious's short-lived band Tone.

In 1984, Boggs headlined a one-woman cabaret act, The Gail Boggs Show, at Upstairs at Greene Street, a nightclub engagement that ran weekly for approximately a year and a half. During that period, she was among the first people to hear a recording of Madonna's "Like a Virgin" and encouraged Grammy Award-winning writer and producer Nile Rodgers to release the track as the lead single from Madonna's forthcoming album.

Boggs's film work includes the 1990 feature Ghost, in which she played Louise Brown, the sister of Whoopi Goldberg's character Ode Mae Brown. She appeared in Curly Sue in 1991 and EDtv in 1999. Television credits include The Bronx Zoo, in which she played Roz Hemphill in 1987, as well as appearances on Get Smart, Boy Meets World, and Better Things in 2020. Photographs of Boggs are held in the Martha Swope archive at the New York Public Library. She was married to Eric Larson, a voice actor and music editor, and they have two daughters, Willie and Mattie.