Janet Margolin

Janet Natalie Margolin (July 25, 1943 – December 17, 1993) was an American actress who worked across theater, film, and television. Born in New York City to a Jewish family, she was the daughter of Benjamin Margolin, a Russian Jewish accountant who founded what is now the Kidney Foundation of New York, and Annette Margolin (née Lief), a dental assistant. She attended the High School of Performing Arts. Until the late 1950s, Margolin had aspirations of becoming a doctor, though her father's connections to the theater world led her toward acting. Her father frequently encouraged her to audition, and she eventually pursued the profession at his associates' urging. Before committing to a stage career, she turned down a contract offer that followed a screen test for Five Finger Exercise, choosing instead to return to New York.

Her earliest professional work included a commercial for Zest and appearances on the soap opera The Edge of Night. In 1961, at eighteen, Margolin was working as a prop assistant at the New York Shakespeare Festival when she auditioned for a Broadway production, beating out approximately 200 other candidates to win the role of Anna in Morris West's Daughter of Silence. Critics responded to her performance with unanimous praise despite mixed notices for the play overall, and she received a Theatre World Award in 1962 as well as a Tony Award nomination for the role.

Her Broadway performance caught the attention of director Frank Perry, who cast her as the female lead in the film David and Lisa. In 1964 she traveled to Argentina to appear in The Eavesdropper, and upon returning she signed a one-film-per-year contract with 20th Century Fox. She went on to co-star with Marlon Brando in the 1965 film Morituri and with Steve McQueen in Nevada Smith. In 1967 she appeared in Enter Laughing as Wanda, the love interest of the character played by Reni Santoni in his first leading role. By that year, the Baltimore Sun had described her as one of Hollywood's brightest new stars, and multiple studios sought to sign her to long-term contracts.

Margolin appeared in two films directed by and starring Woody Allen. In Take the Money and Run (1969) she played the love interest of Allen's bumbling thief character, and in Annie Hall (1977) she played the social-climbing wife of his character. In 1979 she co-starred with Roy Scheider in director Jonathan Demme's thriller Last Embrace. Her final film appearance came in Ghostbusters II in 1989, and her last television credits included an episode of Murder, She Wrote and the 1990 production Columbo: Murder in Malibu.

In August 1968, Margolin married Jerry Brandt in Los Angeles; the marriage ended in divorce in October 1971. In December 1979 she married actor and director Ted Wass, with whom she had two children, including Julian Wass. Though she was frequently and incorrectly identified as the sister of actor Stuart Margolin and director Arnold Margolin, she did appear alongside Stuart Margolin as husband and wife in the pilot episode of the television series Lanigan's Rabbi. She was a friend of producer and actress Jennifer Salt, who had co-starred with Wass in the 1970s sitcom Soap.

Margolin died of ovarian cancer on December 17, 1993, at her home in Los Angeles at the age of fifty. She was cremated, and her ashes were placed in an urn garden at Westwood Memorial Park in Los Angeles.