It’s no surprise, I suppose, that Doris Roberts is such an outspoken opponent of age discrimination in Hollywood. While she’s been working pretty steadily since 1951, when she was twenty-six, I’m not sure I’ve encountered anyone yet who doesn’t think of her as middle-aged or older. Even I think of her as butting retirement age, even though she was not yet sixty when she took the role I think of her in. The show never did seem quite sure how old she was, either.
While she has been in a handful of classic films, I’m not sure even I spotted her in The Taking of Pelham One Two Three. Mostly, she is known for television work. She goes back to the days of live drama, even having played “The Madwoman” in a Studio One in Hollywood production of Jane Eyre. She’s done a lot of acting on the stage, too, also going back to the fifties.
Mostly, she’s people’s moms. Mothers-in-law. A wacky aunt or two. She did the television circuit of the sixties and seventies. Ben Casey. Mary Tyler Moore. The Streets of San Francisco. Soap. Multiple episodes of both Fantasy Island and The Love Boat. She never did Perry Mason, but she did a lot of TV movies.
And then, in its second season, Remington Steele decided to fiddle with their format. Instead of the jealous second operative and the foxy secretary, shenanigans at the beginning of the season led to their having a middle-aged former IRS agent come in as secretary and dabble in crime-fighting. For Mildred Krebs, they cast Doris Roberts. She would remain for the rest of the series.
There are not a lot of roles like Mildred. She was deliberately written to be Of a Certain Age, though I think the character wavered across the border of middle-aged and old. Even by the time the show went off the air, she was still below retirement age, but there was the clear implication that, yes, she was too old to be hired in most jobs. She expresses the opinion on her second episode, as I recall. And while, no, she was never entirely treated as an equal—I’m not sure when or if she gets let in on the show’s big secret—she is, after all, the secretary. She isn’t an equal.
On the other hand, she has skills that come in very handy over the course of the character arc. She’s the computer expert, for example, because they used a lot more computers in the IRS than, say, international jewel thieving back in the eighties. She is smart, if sometimes a little slow on the uptake. Efficient and effective. Yes, she gets caught up in the wackiness field that surrounds Laura (Stephanie Zimbalist) and Remington (Pierce Brosnan), but she also sometimes serves to ground them. She’s a good character, and she’s valued. And, yes, she’s being edged out of the market a lot of places because she’s no longer in her first or even second youth.
No wonder Doris Roberts is mad. As it happens, I don’t love Raymond, so I’ve never seen the show. But my understanding is that she’s a shrill killjoy trying to dominate her adult sons. And, yes, her great gift is being a homemaker, despite the distinct possibility that she might have been better suited to other things. Roles like that are, sadly, a lot more common. Even for women who aren’t even sixty.