Comedian and actress Laraine Newman was born in Los Angeles in 1952. She grew up in Beverly Hills (where seeing celebrities shopping at the supermarket was a normal occurrence) and she herself liked performing, taking improv classes while still in high school, studying mime in Paris, France and eventually becoming a founding member of L.A. improv group the Groundlings in 1974.

That same year Lorne Michaels saw Newman perform on stage and he hired her to join the cast of one of the Lily Tomlin TV specials he wrote and produced for NBC that decade. A year later when NBC hired Lorne to create a Saturday variety show, Lorne recruited Newman to be one of its first cast members. That show was Saturday Night Live and Newman was a cast member for the show’s first five seasons from 1975 to 1980. She became known for playing the shallow valley girl Sherry (this was before the California valley girl stereotype entered the mainstream and she is credited for introducing the accent, later popularized and identified by Frank Zappa in the eighties). She was also known for playing teenage space alien Connie Conehead, Dan Aykroyd’s ditzy public access TV co-host Christie Christina and a Weekend Update field correspondent while Chevy Chase and Jane Curtin were anchors.

Whether Newman was improvising for the Groundlings or playing characters and impersonating celebrities on SNL, Newman loved performing and making audiences laugh. Plus she gained instant fame and recognition and even befriended castmate Gilda Radner. But she also stated that she was not happy for most of her time on the show, recalling the culture shock of moving from L.A. to New York and her worsening drug addiction (she was already a drug addict before she was famous, but like with John Belushi and Chris Farley, the fame and money only exacerbated that problem).

After leaving SNL in the eighties, she continued finding acting work in other TV shows like Laverne & Shirley and St. Elsewhere as well as movies like Woody Allen’s Stardust Memories (1980), Sesame Street Presents: Follow That Bird (1985), Problem Child 2 (1991) and Coneheads (1993) where she did not reprise her role as Connie (who was played in the film by Michelle Burke) but instead played Connie’s Aunt Laarta. But she still struggled with depression and drug dependency through most of this period. That is until she eventually became sober in 1987.

A few years later she married fellow actor Chad Einbinder and eventually had two kids Spike and Hannah Einbinder (who would both also grow up to be comedians and actors) and that was around the time Newman started acting less and less on camera, partly due to her worsening stage fright and partly out of guilt for spending so much time away from her kids. Which is why when the opportunity to voice characters for animation came along, she jumped at it. From her Groundling days forward she was always good at creating characters with her voice anyway, which she credits to her four-octave vocal range that allows her to sound like everything from a man to a child.

Every now and then she still acted in live-action shows when good opportunities came along. Some popular ones she appeared on include Friends, 3rd Rock from the Sun, Ellen, Curb Your Enthusiasm, 7th Heaven, According to Jim, Brothers & Sisters, Entourage, Comedy Bang! Bang!, Los Espookys and Ghosts. But the animated films and TV shows she lent her voice to are seemingly countless. She would often voice guest characters on TV and many minor supporting animated characters on film as one of the unsung heroes behind the “Additional Voices” credit. Some of the animated films you may not have known she was in include Monsters, Inc., Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius, Finding Nemo, Shrek 2, The Incredibles and many more films from Disney, Pixar, Illumination, Warner Bros. Animation and others.

But the most prolific part of her voice acting career has always been in television animation. Her first animated TV role was in USA Network’s Problem Child (1993-94) for which she reprised her role as Lawanda from the 1991 live-action film Problem Child 2. She also had main roles in TV animation, such as when she voiced Miss Information in the Kids’ WB series Histeria! (1998-2000), Pajuna the cow in DreamWorks Animation Television’s The Adventures of Puss in Boots (2015) and Gran Crood in DreamWorks Animation Television’s Dawn of the Croods (2015-17) while she had recurring roles as Ginger’s mom in the Nicktoon As Told by Ginger (2000-06), Queen Jipjorrulac in the Nicktoon The Fairly Oddparents (2001-13), Queen Ligea in Winx Club (2011-13), both Nana and Ms. Janeth in the Tales of Arcadia series and Ms. Tara Ribble in The Epic Tales of Captain Underpants (2018-20) as well as having guest roles in TV shows like The Sylvester & Tweety Mysteries, Pinky and the Brain, Superman: The Animated Series, The New Batman Adventures, Hey Arnold!, What’s New, Scooby-Doo?, Danny Phantom, Justice League Unlimited, Avatar: The Last Airbender, SpongeBob SquarePants, Batman: The Brave and the Bold, Scooby-Doo! Mystery Incorporated, Kung Fu Panda: Legends of Awesomeness, Beware the Batman, Be Cool, Scooby-Doo!, Milo Murphy’s Law, Adventure Time, Apple & Onion, Summer Camp Island, Bob’s Burgers, Infinity Train and Tiny Toons Looniversity. She also occasionally voiced video game characters, including ones from the Star Wars and Final Fantasy series.

If that sounds like a lot of work, Laraine Newman agrees. She said she often checks her own IMDb page to see what she’s doing next. But animation is clearly what she was meant to do, and similarly to fellow voice actor Mark Hamill, who also helped usher in a colossally popular entertainment franchise in the seventies, she has found an avenue outside of the spotlight that is just as creatively satisfying if not more so.