Meet June Squibb, the Hollywood actress getting her big break at 94: the Thelma and Inside Out 2 actress finally landed a lead role, and is also set to star in Scarlett Johansson’s directorial debut
- June Squibb is having a moment, from Disney’s Inside Out 2 to Thelma and the upcoming Eleanor the Great – but the 94-year old has certainly paid her dues in Hollywood
- She started out on Broadway, and has played the scene-stealing mum or grandma in everything from Modern Family and The Big Bang Theory to The Office and Curb Your Enthusiasm
“America’s newest action hero is 94 years old,” talk show host Jimmy Kimmel declared on his show in mid-June, to delighted whoops and cheers from the audience. Those audiences have been watching nonagenarian June Squibb pop up on their screens for years, but it’s only now that she’s been given her first starring role in a film. And not just any film – one that did so well at Sundance that it sparked a bidding war between the studios.
In Thelma, Squibb plays a 93-year-old who gets scammed out of US$10,000 by someone pretending to be her grandson, and then goes on an action-packed, Tom Cruise-inspired mission to recover it. She even does her own stunts in the film.
So just who is Hollywood’s unlikely woman of the moment, and how did she get here?
She’s always been feisty
Born in the US state of Illinois in 1929 to a silent movie pianist mother and an insurance salesman father, according to the Alliance of Women Film Journalists, Squibb told Kimmel that she knew she was destined to be a performer as soon as she “came out of the womb”.
“I always said I’m an actress,” she added. “It never occurred to me that I wasn’t. Even when I was a little girl.” In fact, a young June was so full of self-belief that she even personally quit kindergarten. In a recent Vulture interview, she said, “All they did was take naps and eat cookies, and I thought that was pretty dumb.” When her parents told her she’d have to take responsibility for dropping out herself, she did just that, calling the school and reportedly saying, “This is June Squibb, and I’m not coming back.”
She’s done a bit of everything on her way to the top
A natural tap dancer, per Vulture, Squibb moved to New York in 1957 and got jobs on and off Broadway, and then did scores of other jobs on the side to get by. She posed for “tacky magazines”, performed on cruise ships and in nightclubs, dressed up as Santa’s helper at Christmastime, and donned antennae to sell bug spray at conventions. It wasn’t until 1990 that she scored her first feature role, in Woody Allen’s Alice.