Rhea Perlman | Hot Dogs

Philip Perlman, a Polish immigrant who worked as a clerk at a doll parts factory, and Adele, a bookkeeper, gave birth to Rhea Jo Perlman on March 31, 1948, in Coney Island, Brooklyn. She was raised in Bensonhurst by a Jewish family with Russian links. She earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in drama from Hunter College in New York in 1968.

Perlman began her acting career in the on-off-Broadway play Dracula Sabbat, which ran from September 1970 to June 1971, with a minor part as an attendant. She then had a small part in Gauguin’s film Hot Dogs in 1972. In the same year, she and her husband, Danny DeVito, co-starred in Westbeth Playwrights Feminist Collective’s production of Up – An Uppity Revue. Perlman and her daughter, Lucy DeVito, appeared in Nora and Delia Ephron’s off-Broadway play Love, Loss, and What I Wore at the Westside Theatre in 2009. She also played Danny Castellano’s grandma, Annette Castellano, on The Mindy Project from 2014 to 2017.