Tovah Feldshuh

b. December 27, 1948

by JWA Staff
Our work to expand the Encyclopedia is ongoing. We are providing this brief biography for Tovah Feldshuh until we are able to commission a full entry.

Promotional poster for Golda's Balcony, written by William Gibson and published in 2003.

Tovah Feldshuh set a record for the longest running one-woman show with her starring role in Golda’s Balcony, a Broadway play about Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir. Born Terri Sue Feldshuh, she graduated from Sarah Lawrence College and began her acting career as Terri Fairchild until a boyfriend persuaded her to embrace her Hebrew name, Tovah. She debuted on Broadway in 1973 opposite Christopher Plummer in Cyrano, the same year she began her television career with a brief appearance in Scream, Pretty Peggy. Among her many theater roles, she performed the title role in Yentl both off and on Broadway. She balanced her theater career with scores of film and television roles, including 1985’s Brewster’s Millions, 2001’s Kissing Jessica Stein, and the recurring character Danielle Melnick on Law & Order, for which she was nominated for an Emmy award. In 2015, the same year that she launched a one-woman show called Aging is Optional, she landed three recurring roles at once, playing Ivana in Flesh and Bone, Deanna Monroe in The Walking Dead, and Naomi Bunch in Rachel Bloom’s Crazy Ex-Girlfriend. In 2019 she played supreme court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in the play Sisters in Law. In 2022 she began appearing as Rosie Brice in the Broadway revival of Funny Girl and played Mickey Rabinovitz in Armageddon Time. Also in 2022 she released her memoir Lilyville, which explores Feldshuh’s relationship with her mother Lily. In 2023 she played the bat lady in the Amazon Prime series Harlan Coben's Shelter. She has been nominated for four Tony and two Emmy awards. 

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How to cite this page

Jewish Women's Archive. "Tovah Feldshuh." (Viewed on December 2, 2024) <https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/feldshuh-tovah>.