Career Highlights: David and Lisa, The Last Embrace, Morituri
First Major Screen Credit: David and Lisa (1962)
Biography
Fresh out of New York's High School of Performing Arts, doe-eyed actress Janet Margolin was cast as an emotionally disturbed teenager in the Broadway production Daughter of Silence. Though the play didn't last long, Margolin's performance won her the similar role of a schizophrenic girl who speaks only in backward rhymes in the 1962 film David and Lisa. This award-winning assignment proved to be the high point of Margolin's career; most of her later roles (Mary of Bethany in 1965's The Greatest Story Ever Told, Gina Lollobrigida's daughter in 1968's Buona Sera Mrs. Campbell etc.) made but minimal demands on her acting skills. Better opportunities came her way in a brace of Woody Allen films, Take the Money and Run (1969) and Annie Hall (1977). On TV, Janet Margolin co-starred in the 1975 detective series Lanigan's Rabbi. Janet Margolin died of ovarian cancer at the age of 50; she was survived by her husband, actor Ted Wass. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
Margolin was born in New York City, the daughter of Benjamin Margolin, an accountant who was born in Russia and was founder and president of the Nephrosis Foundation, now the Kidney Foundation of New York.
In 1962, she played her first movie role as the female lead in the film David and Lisa. She played the love interest of the lead character in the movie Enter Laughing (1967).
In Take the Money and Run (1969) she played the love interest of the bumbling thief played by Woody Allen, and in Annie Hall (1977) she played the social-climbing wife of the Woody Allen character.
Her last movie role was in Ghostbusters II in 1989, and her last television roles were as a killer on an episode of Murder, She Wrote ("Deadly Misunderstanding") and as a victim in Columbo ("Murder in Malibu") in 1990.
Margolin is sometimes identified as the sister of actor Stuart Margolin and his brother, director Arnold Margolin. However, obituaries of Margolin and her father indicate that she had no brothers.[3][4]