Elaine in her apartment in Manhattan, where
she pursues her acting and modeling career.

Elaine Kussack’s modeling career took off when she decided to “go gray.” She was only in her late forties when she went to a chic hairdresser who cut her hair so short that what was left was gray. She decided to leave it that way, and slipped a picture of her gray-haired self under her agent’s door in Manhattan. By the time she got to Grand Central for her train home to New Rochelle, she got a call, and her career as a gray-haired model was under way.

Elaine is on a roll these days in her acting career, too. She has been cast in the world premiere of the new play by Athol Fugard, the noted South African playwright, novelist, actor and director, to run December 2 through December 20 at the Long Wharf Theatre, in New Haven Connecticut. The play, Have You Seen Us?, is set in a diner in Southern California, and Sam Waterston plays a South African professor now living in the U.S. who must face his personal demons when an elderly Jewish couple sit down to dine. Elaine plays the wife.

She has also been cast in the new CBS TV dramatic series, The Good Wife (premiere on September 22) as a neighbor. Elaine says she’s been getting almost every part in a television show that she goes up for. The premise of The Good Wife is just a bit reminiscent of a recent sad tale in the news. Juliana Margulies plays a wife and mother who resumes her career as a lawyer after her husband, played by Chris Noth, is involved in a very public sex scandal.

Elaine had always wanted to be an opera singer, and had starting singing lessons when she was 13. She is an alto. Her late husband, she says, was ahead of his time in thinking that in addition to being a wife and mother, Elaine should have her career as a singer. Her husband, Lawrence Greenberg, whom she married in 1956, was a captain in the Air Force and he had been sent to the University of Chicago in 1959 for a degree. In 1961 Elaine moved with her husband and small daughter from Chicago to Buffalo, New York, where her son was born.

In Buffalo, her roles included Kate in Cole Porter’s Kiss Me Kate, Regina Gibbons in Marc Blitzstein’s opera, Regina (based on Lillian Hellman’s play, The Little Foxes), Madame Ernestine Von Liebedich in Rick Besoyan’s musical, Little Mary Sunshine, and Mrs. Peachum, in The Three Penny Opera (dramatist Bertold Brecht, composer Kurt Weill).

In 1964, her husband’s stint in the Air Force took the family to Cherry Hill, New Jersey. Elaine wasn’t happy just staying home in Cherry Hill, and her husband asked her what she wanted to be. She said she wanted to be on Broadway. (Once, when she was auditioning for a role in an opera, she had been advised to aim for Broadway, instead.)

Elaine at her desk with her children
when young in pictures behind her.

“What’s stopping you?” he asked. “Two kids and a two-hour trip to Manhattan” was her reply. Her husband’s reply to that was “Get a sitter. Get on a bus. Now what’s stopping you?” So Elaine got herself a new singing teacher, and auditioned for a production of Kiss Me Kate to play on the Guber-Gross summer circuit, in a chain of suburban theaters headed by Lee Guber with his partner Shelley Gross. Elaine got into the chorus (with Goldie Hawn) and was understudy for Metropolitan Opera Star Patrice Munsel as Kate.

Whenever she was an understudy, Elaine says, she would sit with eyes glued to the stage during every performance so that she could go on at a moment’s notice, and she knew it would happen. It did, one time, on the Guber-Gross circuit. Elaine sang the role of Kate without any rehearsal. Afterward, she got a compliment from Lee Guber, when he said, “Nobody asked for their money back!”

Elaine’s mother-in-law took care of the children for the 12 weeks Elaine was on tour. In believing that Elaine should have a career, her mother-in-law, like Elaine’s husband, was ahead of the times.

Photos show Elaine in Buffalo roles: from left – Mme.
Ernestine, Regina (group), Golde, Mrs. Peachum, Kate.

Elaine’s husband served in Vietnam in 1967 and 1968. Before he left for Vietnam, Elaine recalls, he said he knew he would be back and he “parked” her and the children in New Rochelle. Elaine continued to live in New Rochelle until 1995, when she moved to an apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. A few years after she arrived in New Rochelle, she got an audition (thanks to a friend who was married to a woman who had gone to college with Hal Prince, the producer) for Fiddler on the Roof.

Based on a story by Sholem Aleichem about Tevye the Milkman, Fiddler (music by Jerry Bock, lyrics by Sheldon Harnick) opened on September 22, 1964 and closed on July 2, 1972, and held a record for 10 years for its long run. Elaine was hired in 1969 as understudy for the roles of Golde, Tevye’s wife, and Yenta the matchmaker, and she got to go on in both roles in 1969 and 1970.

Bette Midler was playing Tzeitzel at the time, in her first major Broadway role. She started in the chorus, in 1966, and took over the role of Tevye’s eldest daughter in 1967. She baby-sat Elaine’s daughter one Saturday afternoon between shows because, Elaine says, Bette Midler was the only person Elaine felt comfortable asking.

Closer look at Elaine playing Kate
in Kiss Me Kate in Buffalo, NY.

In the early 70's, Elaine went on tour with the national company of Fiddler as Golde, and toured in summer stock for two summers, one as Golde and one as Yente, with Metropolitan Opera star Robert Merrill as Tevye. During her tour as Yente, Elaine played at The Muny, the nation’s oldest and largest outdoor theater, in Forest Park in St. Louis. There were 18 tennis courts nearby, and that was when Elaine developed a passion for tennis, which she gave up only recently. Now she walks and swims.

In the 80’s Elaine started to get work on TV shows such as Kate and Allie, The Murderers, Seventh Avenue, and a Robert Klein special, as well as on daytime soaps. Recently she appeared on Saturday Night Live and The Jimmy Fallon Show. On Saturday Night Live, she appeared in a skit in which everyone had a big butt, which proves, says Elaine, who is slim and petite, that you can do anything with pictures.

She has also appeared in Ugly Betty in 2008 and 2009 as Betty’s neighbor, Mrs. Bowen, in Hope & Faith in 2006 as Esther, in Law and Order: Special Victims Unit in 2002 and 2003 as Lois, and in Sex and the City in 2003 as the rabbi’s wife.

Elaine has been in films as well, and is a member of the Screen Actors Guild as well as of Actors’ Equity and AFTRA (American Federation of Television and Radio Artists). She has gotten parts in Dressed to Kill (Universal Studios) and Arthur (Warner Brothers), and plays half of the Elderly Couple in Ghost Town (Dream Works Pictures). In an independent film that was completed recently, A Little Help, she plays a woman at a funeral who tells the widow what to do with her life.

Elaine’s Broadway credits include, in addition to Fiddler on the Roof, understudy for Anne Jackson as Esther and for the role of Leah in The Flowering Peach, which was produced by Tony Randall’s National Actors’ Theatre and which had a brief run in 1994.

Among Elaine’s many off-Broadway roles was one in which she played one of two grandmothers in a play titled Over the River and Through the Woods, by Joe DiPietro, in 2000. She was understudy for the roles of two Italian grandmothers with diametrically opposed temperaments, and she was confident that she could do either role at a moment’s notice. Then she got the part of one of the grandmothers, Aida.

Elaine played Aida again more recently at the John W. Engeman Theater, in Northport, Long Island, New York. In a review of the play in The New York Times, Anita Gates wrote, with respect to Elaine as Aida and the other three actors as the other grandparents, “Saddled with tired, stereotypical characters, these four seasoned actors manage, occasionally, to transcend the material” (August 24, 2008).

Elaine grew up in Flatbush, Brooklyn and was graduated from Midwood High School in Brooklyn in 1947. She was graduated in 1950 with a Bachelor of Arts degree from Hunter College, in New York City, where she majored in English, and got a Master of Arts degree in English literature from Columbia University in 1951. She taught English in junior high for four years, then at Midwood High from 1955 to 1959. In the 80’s she taught for ten years as an adjunct professor at Pace University in Pleasantville, New York.

Elaine is not the only member of her family to have been involved with television shows. When her husband came back from Vietnam and returned to civilian life, he worked for a period with his brother producing TV game shows, before becoming a successful toy inventor (his Alfie the Robot was one of the first electronic toys). Elaine’s daughter, Carin Greenberg, is an Emmy-award-winning writer for children’s television. (Elaine has three teen-age grandchildren – her daughter has a daughter, and her son has a son and a daughter.)

Elaine’s interests, however, extend beyond the world of stage and screen (big and little). When she was young, Elaine says, she studied biology as the easiest way to fulfill her science requirement and went no further because she was afraid that science was too difficult. Now she finds it fascinating. “Any time a lecture is about the universe,” Elaine says, “I go.”

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