The makeup took something like nine hours, and Kane had a really hard time with the prosthetics, she said, finding them claustrophobic. But when they stepped on set and saw each other, “we just giggled, all the time, looking at each other,” Crystal said. And when he riffed, Kane kept up; Reiner had to step away, “because he was laughing too loud.”
Filming at an old-school production facility in England, with costumed players everywhere, they went to lunch at the canteen, still in their get-ups — and stayed in character. Crystal said: “‘What’s in the mutton? It’s so good.’ ‘Do you really think you should? You know, your cholesterol.’”
“It was just so much fun,” he said. “I hope that we get to do something else together again, because it would be outrageous. Now we don’t need the makeup.”
Kane’s first, most quotable role might be her breakthrough part, Simka Dahblitz-Gravas, the wife of Kaufman’s mechanic Latka Gravas, on “Taxi.” She arrived several seasons in; after a few guest appearances, she ran into Brooks, a creator of the series, at a party (“I think it was Carrie Fisher and Penny Marshall’s birthday party, which were notorious,” she said) and he asked if she would come back.
The series, a monster hit from 1978 to 1983, shaped her understanding of how to play comedy, she said. She was eager to please, but Brooks told her: “Don’t try to be funny. If we wrote it funny, it would be funny, and if it’s not, we have to fix it.”
Read More: The Highly Deceptive, Deeply Loved, Down-to-Earth Carol Kane
