Peters has appeared in 33 feature films or television films beginning in 1973, including the 1976 Mel Brooks film Silent Movie (for which she was nominated for a Golden Globe Award), the musical Annie (1982), Pink Cadillac (1989), in which she co-starred with Clint Eastwood, and Woody Allen‘s Alice (1990).

Peters starred opposite Steve Martin in The Jerk (1979), in a role that he wrote for her, and again in Pennies from Heaven (1981), for which she won the Golden Globe Award as Best Motion Picture Actress in a Comedy or Musical.^[2][10] In Pennies from Heaven, she played Eileen Everson, a schoolteacher turned prostitute. Of her performance in Pennies From Heaven, John DiLeo wrote that she “is not only poignant as you’d expect but has a surprising inner strength.”^[20] Pauline Kael wrote in The New Yorker: “Peters is mysteriously right in every nuance.”^[21]

Peters appeared with three generations of the Kirk Douglas family in the 2003 film It Runs in the Family, in which she played the wife of Michael Douglas‘s character. In May 2006, she appeared in the film Come le formiche (Wine and Kisses) with F. Murray Abraham, filmed in Italy, playing a rich American who becomes involved with an Italian family that owns a vineyard. The DVD was released in 2007 in Italy.^[22] She starred in a 2012 film titled Coming Up Roses, playing a former musical comedy actress with two daughters.^[23]

Peters was born into a Sicilian-American family in Ozone Park in the New York City borough of Queens, the youngest of three children.^[3] Her mother, Marguerite (née Maltese),^[4] started her in show business by putting her on the television show Juvenile Jury at the age of three and a half. Her father, Peter Lazzara, drove a bread delivery truck.^[5] Her siblings are casting director Donna DeSeta^[6] and Joseph Lazzara.^[5] She appeared on the television shows Name That Tune and several times on The Horn and Hardart Children’s Hour at age five.^{[citation needed]}

In January 1958, at age nine, she obtained her Actors Equity Card in the name Bernadette Peters to avoid ethnic typecasting, with the stage name taken from her father’s first name.^{[citation needed]} She made her professional stage debut the same month in This Is Goggle, a comedy directed by Otto Preminger that closed during out-of-town tryouts before reaching New York.^[7] She then appeared on NBC television as Anna Stieman in A Boy Called Ciske, a Kraft Mystery Theatre production, in May 1958, and in a vignette entitled “Miracle in the Orphanage”, part of “The Christmas Tree”, a Hallmark Hall of Fame production, in December 1958,^[8] with fellow child actor Richard Thomas and veteran actors Jessica Tandy and Margaret Hamilton.^[9] She first appeared on the New York stage at age 10 as Tessie in the New York City Center revival of The Most Happy Fella (1959).^[10] In her teen years, she attended Quintano’s School for Young Professionals, a now-defunct private school.^[7]

At age 13, Peters appeared as one of the “Hollywood Blondes” and was an understudy for “Dainty June” in the second national tour of Gypsy.^[11] During this tour, Peters first met her long-time accompanist, conductor and arranger Marvin Laird, who was the assistant conductor for the tour. Laird recalled, “I heard her sing an odd phrase or two and thought, ‘God that’s a big voice out of that little girl'”.^[12] The next summer, she played Dainty June in summer stock, and in 1962 she recorded her first single. In 1964, she played Liesl in The Sound of Music and Jenny in Riverwind in summer stock at the Mt. Gretna Playhouse (Pennsylvania), and Riverwind again at the Bucks County Playhouse in 1966.^[13][14][15] Upon graduation from high school, she started working steadily, appearing Off-Broadway in the musicals The Penny Friend (1966) and Curley McDimple (1967)^[10] and as a standby on Broadway in The Girl in the Freudian Slip (1967). She made her Broadway debut in Johnny No-Trump in 1967, and next appeared as George M. Cohan‘s sister Josie opposite Joel Grey in George M! (1968), winning the Theatre World Award.^{[citation needed]}

Peters’s performance as “Ruby” in the 1968 Off-Broadway production of Dames at Sea, a parody of 1930s musicals, brought her critical acclaim and her first Drama Desk Award.^[10] She had appeared in an earlier 1966 version of Dames at Sea at the Off-Off-Broadway performance club Caffe Cino.^[16][17][18] Peters had starring roles in her next Broadway vehicles—Gelsomina in the 1969 musical version of the Italian film of the same name, La Strada (for which she won good reviews but the show closed after one performance) and Hildy in a revival of On the Town (1971), for which she received her first Tony Award nomination. She played Mabel Normand in Mack and Mabel (1974), receiving another Tony nomination. Clive Barnes wrote: “With the splashy Mack & Mabel … diminutive and contralto Bernadette Peters found herself as a major Broadway star.”^[19] The Mack and Mabel cast album became popular among musical theatre fans.^[10] She moved to Los Angeles in the early 1970s to concentrate on television and film work.

Television[edit]