Jane Curtin

Jane Curtin is an American actress and comedian who came to public attention as one of the original cast members of Saturday Night Live and went on to win two consecutive Primetime Emmy Awards as the lead of a network sitcom. She was born Jane Therese Curtin in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1947, the daughter of an insurance executive and a homemaker, and was raised in a Catholic family.

Curtin attended Northfield School for Girls and then Elizabeth Seton Junior College before transferring to Northeastern University, where she briefly studied. She left college short of a degree to join the Boston-based comedy troupe The Proposition, performing improvisational and topical sketches in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

In 1975 she joined the original cast of NBC's Saturday Night Live, alongside Dan Aykroyd, John Belushi, Chevy Chase, Gilda Radner, Laraine Newman, and Garrett Morris. Over five seasons she anchored the "Weekend Update" desk, played the Coneheads matriarch Prymaat, and developed a reputation for crisp, dry timing in a cast often associated with bigger personalities.

After leaving the show in 1980 she starred opposite Susan Saint James in the CBS sitcom Kate and Allie, winning Emmy Awards for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Comedy Series in 1984 and 1985. She later led the science-fiction comedy 3rd Rock from the Sun as anthropologist Mary Albright, and appeared in films including Coneheads and the Why Him? ensemble.

The name Jane is an English form of the medieval French Jehanne, derived from Latin Iohannes and ultimately from the Hebrew Yochanan, meaning "Yahweh is gracious."