Explore Joanna Merlin Net Worth, Filmography, Crew Credits, Height, Age, Family, Personal Life, Relationships, Career, Joanna Merlin Biography and Birthdate.

Joanna Merlin Net Worth

Joanna Merlin Biography

Joanna Merlin (born Joann Ratner; July 15, 1931) was an American actress and casting director who has worked with Stephen Sondheim and starred in the original Broadway production of Fiddler on the Roof. She has written two acting guides and is a faculty member of New York University’s graduate acting program. In recent years, she has become known for her recurring role on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit as Judge Lena Petrovsky.

Joann Ratner, who later took her mother’s maiden name, was born in Chicago, Illinois, to Toni Merlin and Harry Ratner, a Jewish grocer. Her family also included her older sister Harriet Glickman (1926-2020) who would go on to gain recognition for having helped persuade Charles Schulz to add a black character to his Peanuts strip. Merlin first acted on stage at age 11, joining a community theatre production, Too Many Marys. Merlin graduated from UCLA and later studied under Michael Chekhov, learning his world-renowned acting technique. She has been described as the last student of Michael Chekhov who is still alive and teaching.

Merlin made her first screen appearance in Cecil B. DeMille’s film The Ten Commandments in 1956. Five years later, she made her Broadway debut in Becket before playing Tzeitel in Harold Prince’s production of Fiddler on the Roof. She left the cast of Fiddler on the Roof before the end of its tour to take care of her two small children but Harold Prince gave her the opportunity to become involved in casting with a more flexible schedule. Company was the first musical for which Merlin served as the casting director. She was also in charge of casting for such plays as Follies, Evita and Sweeney Todd.

In 1986, she served as casting director for the John Carpenter film, Big Trouble in Little China.

After making appearances in several feature films, including the movie Fame, in which she played Miss Olivia Berg, a classical dance teacher; Merlin appeared in the NBC crime drama Law & Order in 1992 as a defense attorney. Like many actors from that show, she went on to play other characters in the Law & Order franchise – another defense attorney in the original show and a more recurring role as Judge Lena Petrovsky, a judge who was very stern, by-the-book, and has scolded or sanctioned, at various times, ADAs Casey Novak (Diane Neal) and Alexandra Cabot (Stephanie March) and Detective (now Lieutenant) Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay), in its first spin-off Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. In the latter role, she appeared in every season between the years 2000 and 2011.

In 2001, Joanna Merlin wrote Auditioning: An Actor-Friendly Guide and in 2007, shared her knowledge of the theatre industry in the instructional video Master Classes in the Michael Chekhov Technique. She teaches in New York University’s graduate acting program at the Tisch School of the Arts and in 1999, founded the Michael Chekhov Association where she teaches acting workshops.

Source: Article “Joanna Merlin” from Wikipedia in English, licensed under CC-BY-SA 3.0.

Joanna Merlin Filmography (Cast)

Overview: Aspiring teen folk singer is torn whether to continue her singing or to accept an educational scholarship.

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Overview: When a guardian angel – who invisibly watches over the citizens of Los Angeles – becomes captivated by a strong-willed heart surgeon, he ponders trading in his pure, otherworldly existence for a mortal life with his beloved. The couple embarks on a tender but forbidden romance spanning heaven and Earth.

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Overview: Washington, D.C. psychologist Carol Bennell and her colleague Dr. Ben Driscoll are the only two people on Earth who are aware of an epidemic running rampant through the city. They discover an alien virus aboard a crashed space shuttle that transforms anyone who comes into contact with it into unfeeling drones while they sleep. Carol realizes her son holds the key to stopping the spread of the plague and she races to find him before it is too late.

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Overview: Based on Graham Greene’s novel about a flawed but devoted priest in 1930s Mexico who attempts to perform his duties while eluding a police lieutenant determined to capture him.

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Overview: A group of graduate students and scientists uncover an ancient canister in an abandoned church, but when they open it, they inadvertently unleash a strange liquid and an evil force on all of humanity.

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Overview: Family members face hard decisions about the care of their elderly father who needs constant care and can no longer safely live alone, which particularly affects the eldest son’s life, placing his impending marriage in jeopardy.

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Overview: An Argentinian newspaper publisher is imprisoned by his government for dissent.

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Overview: A Russian emigre prides himself on the way he’s molded himself into a real Yankee in the USA, though the world he lives in, New York’s Lower East Side in the late 19th century, is almost exclusively populated by other Jewish immigrants. When his wife finally arrives in the New World, however, she has a lot of assimilating to do.

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Overview: In a 1966 New Jersey high school, Jill and new student Sheik from the other side of the tracks make their way in a first love romance.

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Overview: Joe Gideon is at the top of the heap, one of the most successful directors and choreographers in musical theater. But he can feel his world slowly collapsing around him – his obsession with work has almost destroyed his personal life, and only his bottles of pills keep him going.

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Overview: It’s an extraordinarily touching true-story about Terry Jean Moore, the determined, independent and young woman who is imprisoned for 7 years on account of a “five dollar” robbery. In the prison she will be pregnant by a jailer and she has to fight for bear and keep her child.

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Overview: The story of Rosalie Bonnano, the daughter of a powerful New York Mafia boss who married the son of her father’s rival, another powerful New York Mafia boss.

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Overview: Set in New York City in the sweltering summer, The Wackness tells the story of a troubled teenage drug dealer, who trades pot for therapy sessions with a drug-addled psychiatrist. Things get more complicated when he falls for one of his classmates, who just happens to be the doctor’s daughter. This is a coming-of-age story about sex, drugs, music and what it takes to be a man.

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Overview: Drama (and prospective pilot) about the lives of three women who work in the New York City DA’s office: one a brilliant prosecutor of high-profile cases whose husband is shot and killed in an armed robbery; a second, her tough, bitter, chain-smoking, boozing, wheelchair-bound former mentor; a third, a Latina who is an ambitious legal intern.

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Overview: A liberal activist lawyer alienated his daughter Maggie years ago when she discovered his many affairs. Now a conservative corporate lawyer, Maggie agrees to go up against her father in court. To gain promotion, she must defend an auto manufacturer against charges that their explosion-prone station wagons are unsafe. As her mother begs for peace, Maggie takes on her dad in a trial that turns increasingly personal and nasty.

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Overview: Mildred and Doris are two middle-aged white women, from very different backgrounds, who become lovers and set up house together. Film explores the pleasures and uncertainties of later-life emotional attachment and lesbian identity in a culture that glorifies youth and heterosexual romance.

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Overview: Malcolm and Lily try to start their lives as they watch Malcolm’s grandparents’ fall apart.

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Overview: New York Times reporter Sydney Schanberg is on assignment covering the Cambodian Civil War, with the help of local interpreter Dith Pran and American photojournalist Al Rockoff. When the U.S. Army pulls out amid escalating violence, Schanberg makes exit arrangements for Pran and his family. Pran, however, tells Schanberg he intends to stay in Cambodia to help cover the unfolding story — a decision he may regret as the Khmer Rouge rebels move in.

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Overview: Escaping death, a Hebrew infant is raised in a royal household to become a prince. Upon discovery of his true heritage, Moses embarks on a personal quest to reclaim his destiny as the leader and liberator of the Hebrew people.

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Overview: Three teenage girls come of age while working at a pizza parlor in Mystic, Connecticut.

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Overview: A chronicle of the lives of several teenagers who attend a New York high school for students gifted in the performing arts.

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Overview: It’s a hot summer day in 1933 in South Philly, where 12-year old Gennaro lives with his widowed mom and his ailing grandpa, who sits outside holding tight to his last quarter, which he’s promised to Gennaro and which Gennaro would like to have to buy a ticket to the plush new movie theater. But grandpa’s not ready to pass on the quarter or pass on to his final reward: he has some unfinished business with a woman from his past, and he enlists Gennaro to act as his emissary.

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Overview: A photographer struggles to make enough money to marry his fiancee, who is starting to believe he’s delaying their marriage deliberately.

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Overview: Would you be willing to walk away from everyone and everything you’ve ever known in exchange for your safety? This is the question facing career criminal Bobby “Bats” Batton (Tom Sizemore); on the outs with the mob and facing prosecution for a number of serious crimes, Batton is offered a deal by the FBI in which he will be given immunity in exchange for testifying against his former partners. However, Batton will have to join the Federal Witness Protection Program, which means that he, his wife, and his children will never again see their friends and family.

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Overview: On the night of 16 July 1942, ten year old Sarah and her parents are being arrested and transported to the Velodrome d’Hiver in Paris where thousands of other jews are being sent to get deported. Sarah however managed to lock her little brother in a closet just before the police entered their apartment. Sixty years later, Julia Jarmond, an American journalist in Paris, gets the assignment to write an article about this raid, a black page in the history of France. She starts digging archives and through Sarah’s file discovers a well kept secret about her own in-laws.

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Overview: A failed New Jersey inventor embarks on a career as a standup comic, turns to drink, and labors to keep his family together.

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Overview: Electrician Gus gets the chance to fulfil a childhood dream by buying an old bowling-alley with some of his friends, but first he must find his ex-wife a new husband so he can stop paying alimony.

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Overview: A recently appointed black police commissioner is killed. So, Frank Janek is assigned to investigate.

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Overview: Michael Learned plays Mary Benjamin, a recently widowed woman who, confronted with her son’s departure for college, decides to resume her career as a head nurse in a Manhattan hospital in this pilot movie for the short-lived TV series.

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Overview: In cases ripped from the headlines, police investigate serious and often deadly crimes, weighing the evidence and questioning the suspects until someone is taken into custody. The district attorney’s office then builds a case to convict the perpetrator by proving the person guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. Working together, these expert teams navigate all sides of the complex criminal justice system to make New York a safer place.

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Overview: In the criminal justice system, sexually-based offenses are considered especially heinous. In New York City, the dedicated detectives who investigate these vicious felonies are members of an elite squad known as the Special Victims Unit. These are their stories.

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Overview: Naked City is a police drama series which aired from 1958 to 1963 on the ABC television network. It was inspired by the 1948 motion picture of the same name, and mimics its dramatic “semi-documentary” format.

In 1997, the episode “Sweet Prince of Delancey Street” was ranked #93 on TV Guide’s “100 Greatest Episodes of All Time”.

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Overview: New York Undercover is an American police drama The series stars Detective J.C. Williams and Detective Eddie Torres, two undercover detectives in New York City’s Fourth Precinct who were assigned to investigate various crimes and gang-related cases.

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Overview: Another World is an American television soap opera that ran on NBC for 35 years from May 4, 1964 to June 25, 1999. Set in the fictional town of Bay City, the show in its early years opens with announcer Bill Wolff intoning its epigram, “We do not live in this world alone, but in a thousand other worlds,” which Phillips said represented the difference between “the world of events we live in, and the world of feelings and dreams that we strive for.” Another World focused less on the conventional drama of domestic life as seen in other soap operas, and more on exotic melodrama between families of different classes and philosophies.

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Overview: After receiving a scholarship from the state, a recent Columbia University medical school graduate is required to set up his practice in an eccentric Alaskan town.

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Overview: Set in New York City, the series brings the viewer into the jury room to watch the deliberators try to answer the many questions posed during a trial. As facts are exposed through flashbacks of testimony and crime footage, viewers will form their own opinions about the guilt or innocence of the defendant. Following each verdict, a final flashback will let viewers see the crime as it actually happened and reveal whether or not the jury made the right decision.

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Overview: Baby Talk is an American sitcom that aired on ABC from March 8, 1991 until May 8, 1992 as part of ABC’s TGIF lineup. The show was loosely based on the popular Look Who’s Talking movies and was adapted for television by Ed Weinberger. Amy Heckerling created original characters for the series while using key creative and script elements from Look Who’s Talking, which she had written and directed. Weinberger served as executive producer during the first season, and was replaced by Saul Turteltaub and Bernie Orenstein in the second season.

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Overview: A truly amazing, fantastical, science fiction, funny and odd, and sometimes scary, sad and endearing anthology series presented by Steven Spielberg with guest appearances by many famous actors, actresses, and directors.

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Overview: Alicia Florrick boldly assumes full responsibility for her family and re-enters the workforce after her husband’s very public sex and political corruption scandal lands him in jail.

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Overview: TV’s most-watched history series brings to life the compelling stories from our past that inform our understanding of the world today.

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Overview: L.A. Law is an American television legal drama series that ran for eight seasons on NBC from September 15, 1986, to May 19, 1994.

Created by Steven Bochco and Terry Louise Fisher, it contained many of Bochco’s trademark features including a large number of parallel storylines, social drama and off-the-wall humor. It reflected the social and cultural ideologies of the 1980s and early 1990s, and many of the cases featured on the show dealt with hot-topic issues such as abortion, racism, gay rights, homophobia, sexual harassment, AIDS, and domestic violence. The series often also reflected social tensions between the wealthy senior lawyer protagonists and their less well-paid junior staff.

The show was popular with audiences and critics, and won 15 Emmy Awards throughout its run, four of which were for Outstanding Drama Series.

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Overview: In cases ripped from the headlines, police investigate serious and often deadly crimes, weighing the evidence and questioning the suspects until someone is taken into custody. The district attorney’s office then builds a case to convict the perpetrator by proving the person guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. Working together, these expert teams navigate all sides of the complex criminal justice system to make New York a safer place.

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Overview: A true story about a woman who fights her brother-in-law’s parents for custody of her deceased sister’s baby upon learning that her brother-in-law murdered her sister.

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Joanna Merlin Crew Credits

Title	Job	Department	Release
Into the Woods	Casting	Production	1991-03-15
Big Trouble in Little China	Casting	Production	1986-05-30
Mr. & Mrs. Bridge	Casting	Production	1990-11-23
The Last Emperor	Casting	Production	1987-10-04
Jefferson in Paris	Casting	Production	1995-03-31
Little Buddha	Casting	Production	1993-12-01

Translations

• English (en): Joanna Merlin — Joanna Merlin (born Joann Ratner; July 15, 1931) was an American actress and casting director who has worked with Stephen Sondheim and starred in the original Broadway production of Fiddler on the Roof. She has written two acting guides and is a faculty member of New York University’s graduate actin…
• German (de): —
• French (fr): — Joann Ratner (née le 15 juillet 1931 à Chicago) est une actrice et directrice de casting américaine, connue sous le nom de scène de Joanna Merlin.

  Au cinéma, Joanna Merlin débute dans le péplum américain Les Dix Commandements de Cecil B. DeMille (avec Charlton Heston et Yul Brynner), sorti en 1956)…

• Mandarin (zh): 乔安娜·梅林 — 乔安娜·梅林（出生于乔安·拉特纳;1931 年 7 月 15 日）是一位美国女演员和选角导演，曾与斯蒂芬·桑德海姆合作并出演了百老汇原创作品《屋顶上的小提琴手》。她撰写了两本表演指南，并且是纽约大学研究生表演课程的教员。近年来，她因在《法律与秩序：特殊受害者小组》中饰演莉娜·彼得罗夫斯基法官而广为人知。

  乔安·拉特纳（Joann Ratner）后来随了母亲的娘家姓，出生于伊利诺伊州芝加哥，父亲是托尼·梅林（Toni Merlin）和犹太杂货商哈里·拉特纳（Harry Ratner）。她的家人还包括她的姐姐哈丽特·格里克曼（Harriet Glickman，1926-2020 年），她因帮助说…