Career
Carroll began her acting career in 1947. She got her first acting credit as Lorelei Crawford in the 1948 film Hometown Girl. In 1952, she made her television debut in The Red Buttons Show. In 1955, her Broadway debut in Catch a Star! garnered her a nomination for a Tony Award for Best Featured Actress in a Musical. In 1956, Carroll won an Emmy Award for her work on Caesar's Hour. From 1961–1964, she was a regular on the sitcom Make Room for Daddy . She guest-starred in the drama anthology series The DuPont Show with June Allyson. She co-starred in the 1965 television production of Rodgers and Hammerstein's Cinderella as "Prunella", one of the wicked stepsisters. Carroll also appeared on many variety shows of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, such as The Steve Allen Show, The Danny Kaye Show, The Red Skelton Show, and The Carol Burnett Show.
In the late 1970s, Carroll's successful one-woman show, Gertrude Stein, Gertrude Stein, Gertrude Stein, by playwright Marty Martin, won several major theater awards; her recorded version won a 1980 Grammy Award for Best Spoken Word, Documentary or Drama.
In early 1976, Carroll was cast as Lily, the mother of Shirley Feeney, on the hit ABC situation comedy, Laverne & Shirley, in the episode "Mother Knows Worst" . She portrayed Pearl Markowitz, the mother of Adam Arkin's character Lenny Markowitz, in the 1977 CBS situation comedy Busting Loose. In 1978, she made a guest appearance on The Love Boat. Her television roles in the 1980s included newspaper owner Hope Stinson on the syndicated The Ted Knight Show (formerly Too Close for Comfort) during its final season in 1986, and Gussie Holt, the mother of Suzanne Somers's lead character in the syndicated sitcom She's the Sheriff (1987–1989).
Starting in the late 1980s, Carroll took several voice-over roles for cartoons, including A Pup Named Scooby-Doo, Galaxy High, Foofur, and the film A Goofy Movie. On the series Pound Puppies, she had a regular role voicing Katrina Stoneheart. On two Garfield television specials (A Garfield Christmas and Garfield's Thanksgiving), she portrayed Jon's feisty grandmother. She also voiced the character of Granny in the 2005 re-release of Hayao Miyazaki's My Neighbor Totoro.
In 1989, Carroll portrayed the sea witch Ursula in Disney's The Little Mermaid and sang "Poor Unfortunate Souls", which was later certified Platinum by RIAA. In interviews, Carroll referred to the role, her first as a villain, as one of the favorites of her career. She later reprised the role in other forms of media, including the Kingdom Hearts series of video games, the Little Mermaid television series, the Disney+ series The Wonderful World of Mickey Mouse, and various Disney theme parks attractions and shows, as well as voicing Ursula's crazy sister Morgana in the direct-to-video sequel The Little Mermaid II: Return to the Sea.
Carroll also appeared on a variety of game shows including You Don't Say, To Tell the Truth, Match Game 73, Password All-Stars, I've Got a Secret, and The $10,000 Pyramid.
A member of the Actors Studio, she also enjoyed a successful career in the theater, appearing in numerous plays including productions of Our Town and Sophocles's Electra. In 1990, she starred in The Merry Wives of Windsor at the Shakespeare Theatre at the Folger in the role of Sir John Falstaff, a balding knight with whiskers.
When drama critic Frank Rich of The New York Times reviewed her performance in The Merry Wives of Windsor, he wrote, "Her performance is a triumph from start to finish, and, I think, a particularly brave and moving one, with implications that go beyond this one production. Ms. Carroll and Mr. Kahn help revivify the argument that the right actresses can perform some of the great classic roles traditionally denied to women and make them their own. It's not a new argument, to be sure; female Hamlets stretch back into history. But what separates Ms. Carroll's Falstaff from some other similar casting experiments of late is that her performance exists to investigate a character rather than merely as ideological window dressing for a gimmicky production."
