Janeane Garofalo ( jə-NEEN gə-ROF-əl-oh; born September 28, 1964) is an American comedian and actress. The accolades she has received include nominations for two Primetime Emmy Awards and a Screen Actors Guild Award.
Garofalo began her career as a stand-up comedian and became a cast member on The Ben Stiller Show, The Larry Sanders Show, and Saturday Night Live, then appeared in more than 50 movies, with leading or major roles in The Truth About Cats & Dogs, Wet Hot American Summer, The Matchmaker, Reality Bites, The Wild, Steal This Movie!, Clay Pigeons, Sweethearts, Mystery Men, The Minus Man, The Independent, Ratatouille, and Flora & Ulysses. She has appeared on television programs such as The West Wing, Wet Hot American Summer: First Day of Camp, 24, Girlfriends' Guide to Divorce, and Ideal.
She was the co-host on Air America Radio's The Majority Report from March 2004 until July 2006.
Early life
Garofalo was born in Newton, New Jersey, the daughter of Joan and Carmine Garofalo. Her mother, a secretary in the petrochemical industry, died of cancer when Janeane was 24; her father is a former Exxon executive. Garofalo is of Italian descent. She grew up in various places, including: Ontario, California; Madison, New Jersey, where she attended Madison High School; and Houston, Texas, where she graduated from James E. Taylor High School. Garofalo has said that she disliked life in Houston because of the heat and humidity and the emphasis on prettiness and sports in high school.
While studying history at Providence College, Garofalo entered a comedy talent search sponsored by the Showtime cable network, and won the title of "Funniest Person in Rhode Island." Dreaming of earning a slot on the writing staff of the TV show Late Night with David Letterman, she became a professional standup comic upon graduating from college with degrees in history and American studies. She struggled to make a living for a number of years, working briefly as a bike messenger in Boston.
Stand-up comedy
Garofalo began her comedy career in the mid-1980s. Her comedy is often self-deprecating; she has made fun of popular culture and the pressures on women to conform to body image ideals promoted by the media.
When in San Francisco, Garofalo was a frequent guest at the San Francisco Comedy Condo.
Garofalo's comedy shows involve her and her notebook, which is filled with years' worth of article clippings and random observations she references for direct quotes during her act. Garofalo has said that she does not tell jokes as much as make observations designed to get laughs. Upon arriving in LA in the early 1990s, she had difficulty being passed at the mainstream clubs, and when she was passed at The Improv, she often bombed. She was a pioneer of the alternative comedy scene in Los Angeles in the early 1990s, starting the alt-show at Big & Tall Books in LA on August 6, 1991. Garofalo co-created the "Eating It" alternative stand-up comedy show, which ran at Luna Lounge on the Lower East Side of New York City between 1995 and 2005, frequently hosting the show and appearing as a performer.
She appeared on HBO's Comedy Half-Hour and Comedy Hour specials in 1995 and 1997, respectively, among similar subsequent appearances, including a one-hour stand-up special entitled If I May, performed at Seattle's Moore Theatre that aired on Epix in June 2010 and was released on DVD in September 2010.
Film career
Garofalo has performed a variety of roles in more than 50 feature films, playing leading or large roles in Romy and Michele's High School Reunion, The Truth About Cats & Dogs, I Shot a Man in Vegas, The Matchmaker, Clay Pigeons, Steal This Movie!, Sweethearts, Mystery Men, The Independent, Wet Hot American Summer, Manhood, Ash Tuesday, and Bad Parents.
Her first movie role, filmed the year before she appeared on national television, was a brief comical appearance as a counter worker in a burger joint in Late for Dinner in 1991. Her breakthrough role came in Reality Bites (1994) as Winona Ryder's character's Gap-managing best friend Vickie.
Her further television work and supporting roles in feature films included Bye Bye Love and Now and Then, and a leading role in I Shot a Man in Vegas. In 1996 she was cast in the starring role in the romantic comedy The Truth About Cats & Dogs, a variation on Cyrano de Bergerac, which featured Uma Thurman in the top-billed but smaller role as a beautiful but vapid model, while Garofalo played a highly intelligent radio host. Initially an independent film, it became a studio movie when Thurman joined the project.
Based on the success of that film, a producer offered Garofalo the part of Dorothy Boyd in Jerry Maguire with Tom Cruise if she could lose weight. After trimming down, however, she learned that Renée Zellweger had received the part.
She turned down the role of television reporter Gale Weathers in Wes Craven's Scream because she thought the film would be too violent: "I said I didn't want to be in a movie where a teen girl was disemboweled. I didn't know it turned out so good, and it was a funny movie."
Following up The Truth About Cats and Dogs, Garofalo played the lead role in The Matchmaker, a 1997 romantic comedy film about the misadventures of a cynical American woman who reluctantly visits Ireland; it is Garofalo's first and only lead role to date. That same year, she played a supporting role as a deputy sheriff in the drama Cop Land, a police gangster film starring Sylvester Stallone, Harvey Keitel, Ray Liotta and Robert De Niro. In 1998, she performed her first voice-acting job playing "Ursula the Artist" in Disney's English dub of Studio Ghibli's Kiki's Delivery Service and briefly appeared in Permanent Midnight. In 1999, she starred as "The Bowler" in the film Mystery Men, about an underdog group of super heroes.
In 2000, she portrayed Abbie Hoffman's wife Anita Hoffman opposite Vincent D'Onofrio as Hoffman in Steal This Movie!, involving the couple's political activism during the Vietnam War era. Later that same year, she received second billing under Jerry Stiller in a comedic film about a low-budget movie producer entitled The Independent. The following year, Garofalo was top-billed in Wet Hot American Summer, the 2001 cult comedy about an American summer camp, and starred in The Search for John Gissing.
In 2002, she played Catherine Connolly in The Laramie Project and in 2003, she starred in Manhood and Ash Tuesday, and appeared in the crime film Wonderland. She played a supporting role in Jiminy Glick in Lalawood in 2004.
A puppet version of Garofalo appeared (and was graphically killed off) in the 2004 movie Team America: World Police; while Garofalo was irritated by the parody, she was more upset by the filmmakers' lack of correspondence. "I ran into them in the street, Trey and the other guy, and I said to them, 'The least you could do is send me a puppet.' And they said OK, took my address down... and never sent me a puppet! So while Team America bothered me, the fact they didn't send me my puppet, that bothered me even more."
In 2005, she played the ex-wife of a man coping with the reverberations of a divorce in Duane Hopwood. In 2006, she performed Bridget the giraffe's voice in the animated Disney feature film The Wild. In 2007, she provided the voice of Colette Tatou, a chef in the Pixar/Disney feature film Ratatouille, in which Garofalo affected a pronounced French accent for the role, appropriate for a character based on a French cook described as the world's best female chef. She made cameo appearances in The Guitar in 2008 and Labor Pains in 2009, and starred in Bad Parents in 2012, a comedy about New Jersey soccer moms obsessing over their children's experiences playing the sport. She starred in the 2015 film 3rd Street Blackout.
Television career
Garofalo's big break came in 1990 after meeting Ben Stiller at Canter's Deli in Los Angeles, where they were hanging out with stand-up friends. They…