Julie Kavner

A favor from producer David Davis got Kavner the Rhoda audition. The producers wrote Brenda specifically for her, and the role ran 109 episodes and earned her an Emmy in 1978. That was the trap. She's said she turned down anything that 'smacks of Brenda Morgenstern.' Woody Allen cast her in Hannah and Her Sisters (1986), pulling her out of a post-sitcom stall. From there, a cartoon housewife on The Tracey Ullman Show became the thing that defined the next four decades.

Since 1989, Kavner has voiced Marge, Patty, Selma, and their mother Jacqueline on The Simpsons, earning an estimated $300,000 per episode. That's a career most actors would sell their soul for, with the unusual condition that she never has to publicly perform the voice. Her contract says she'll never be required to promote the show on video, and she almost never does, because publicity 'destroys the illusion.' In 2025, she broke a nearly 20-year live-action absence for Ella McCay, reuniting with Simpsons co-creator James L. Brooks. The show has outlasted most careers. She's outlasted them all quietly.

The man who got her the Rhoda audition, producer David Davis, became her long-term partner. They were together from 1976 until his death in November 2022, reportedly never married. She grants interviews so rarely that The New York Times called her 'nearly reclusive' and 'discreet and guarded beyond the usual reticent star routine.' Her actual favorite characters to voice are Patty and Selma, not Marge. Her distinctive raspy warmth comes from, as she's put it, 'a bump on my vocal cords.' The whole career runs through one accidental voice.