Marilu Henner

Watch Elaine O'Connor-Nardo come through the garage door in Taxi (1978) and you can see the whole of what Marilu Henner does. Elaine is the one driver who does not think of herself as a driver: she has children at home and a gallery job she means to get, and she treats the cab as an interruption to her real life that has lasted several years. Henner plays that without self-pity. A sharp line aimed at Danny DeVito's dispatcher and a flinch at being underestimated come from the same place, and she can give us both inside a single reaction. The joke and the hurt arrive together, which is why the character lasts.

She came to it from the stage. She was in the original Chicago production of Grease in 1971, as Marty, and made her first film with Between the Lines (1977) before Taxi ran from 1978 to 1983 and settled what she would be known for. The films that followed used her quickly and put her down again: Trudi in L.A. Story (1991), Belinda Blair in the film of Noises Off (1992), a farce that at least wanted the timing she had. Television gave her the longer parts, chiefly Ava Evans Newton opposite Burt Reynolds in Evening Shade from 1990 to 1994. Since then there has been guest work, voice acting for the Batman series, a return to Broadway in Chicago, and a run of Hallmark Channel films that has continued into the 2020s.

What works is the timing, which is a dancer's. She trained at her mother's studio in Chicago, and it shows in how she crosses a set and, more usefully, in when she stops. In Taxi she and Judd Hirsch could let a disappointment sit for a beat before the next laugh arrived, which is rarer in a sitcom than it sounds, and the programme is better for it. We were moved, more than we thought a garage full of gag lines could manage, by how plainly tired she lets Elaine be between the jokes. That weariness is the performance; the wisecracks are how Elaine gets through the shift.

What does not work is harder to find, partly because nobody has asked much of her since. The later parts are of a kind, the nurturing or sharp-tongued supporting woman, and the Hallmark mysteries follow a pattern she appears content with. We have not reviewed them and will not judge them here, beyond saying that a performer this quick deserved more scripts that knew what to do with quickness. She has said herself that Taxi "was more than just a project. It was kind of my life for five years." For the viewer it is where to start, and on the evidence in front of us it is where most of the case still rests.