Renée Taylor

Renée Taylor (born Renée Adorée Wexler on March 19, 1933, in the Bronx, New York City) is an American actress, playwright, screenwriter, producer, and director whose career has spanned Broadway, film, and television. Her mother, Frieda Wexler, named her after silent film actress Renée Adorée. Taylor trained at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts and began her professional career performing with improvisational groups during the 1950s before working as a comedian at the New York City nightclub Bon Soir in the early 1960s, where Barbra Streisand served as her opening act.

Taylor's Broadway career extended from 1952 to 2001 and encompassed both performing and book writing. Her stage credits include Lovers and Other Strangers, the musical The Choir Rehearsal, and Agatha Sue, I Love You, as well as starring roles in It Had to Be You and If You Ever Leave Me...I'm Going with You! During the 1960s, she appeared in the play Luv alongside Gene Wilder, an experience that led directly to her being cast in Mel Brooks' 1967 film The Producers, in which she played an actress portraying Eva Braun. Brooks cast Wilder as Leo Bloom after encountering him through that same production.

Taylor and her husband, actor Joseph Bologna, whom she married on August 7, 1965, in Stamford, Connecticut, co-wrote the Broadway comedy Lovers and Other Strangers. Their subsequent screenplay adaptation of the work earned them both an Academy Award nomination and a Writers Guild of America Award nomination for Best Comedy for the 1970 film. The couple continued collaborating on the 1971 film Made for Each Other, which they co-wrote and starred in together.

On television, Taylor became widely recognized for playing Sylvia Fine, the food-loving mother of the titular character on the CBS sitcom The Nanny, a role she held from 1993 to 1999. She joined the series as a recurring cast member during its first season and became a full-time cast member by the third season. Bologna made two guest appearances on the series, first as an egomaniacal actor named Allan Beck and later as a doctor named Morty in the episode "Maternal Affairs." Concurrent with her work on The Nanny, Taylor appeared in the Fox sitcom Daddy Dearest in 1993, playing the mother of Richard Lewis and ex-wife of Don Rickles' character, though the series was cancelled after approximately two months. From 1992 to 1994, she also played the mother of Brian Benben's lead character on the HBO series Dream On.

Taylor's additional television work includes a guest-starring role as Mrs. Matsen, Ted Mosby's neighbor, on How I Met Your Mother between 2008 and 2012, as well as guest appearances on the Disney Channel series Shake It Up and the Nickelodeon series Victorious. She provided voice work as Mrs. Start in the animated film Ice Age: The Meltdown and recurred as Linda's mother Gloria on the animated Fox series Bob's Burgers. Among her film credits, Taylor played Arlene Sherwood opposite Jerry Orbach and John Candy in the 1991 film Delirious, appeared as Mrs. Kessler in the 2016 Netflix film The Do-Over with Adam Sandler, and starred as Ms. Waco Chapman in Tyler Perry's 2013 film Temptation: Confessions of a Marriage Counselor.

Taylor and Bologna's final on-screen collaboration was Tango Shalom, directed by their son Gabriel Bologna. The film was released theatrically in North America on September 3, 2021, and on VOD and DVD on October 29, 2021, following Bologna's death in August 2017. In 2018, Taylor appeared in My Life on a Diet at the Off-Broadway Theatre at St. Clement's, a work she had written with Bologna, beginning July 25 of that year, and subsequently took the production on a national tour.