She's the quintessential working actor, and that is why her good year is cause for general celebration. It's proof that hard work pays off, that talent will win out, that there is justice in a business that often seems on the verge of suicide-by-trendiness. There is hope, then, for us all.....She is funny, she is fearless and she works with what she's got. All the time.I think those last two lines exactly encapsulate what I like about Jane Lynch. She didn't go out and get a ton of plastic surgery to try to look like something other than what she is. She hasn't hidden the fact that she's gay. She's embraced exactly who she is--tall, slightly goofy-looking, and the ability to deliver the most improbable lines in the universe with an absolutely straight face--and turned them into enormous assets. Just like there's a market for roguish middle-aged heroes that's been cornered by post-comeback Robert Downey, Jr., and a market for impossibly-sweet looking ingenues that Rachel McAdams and Amanda Seyfried are duking it out over, Lynch absolutely dominates the roles available for hilarious, incongruous middle-aged women. Unlike those other actors, though, I'm not tired of her yet. I'm hugely impressed with the way she transitioned from being part of Christopher Guest's troupe to part of the Judd Apatow family (she is the single funniest things about Talladega Nights), and I'm thrilled that she's moving beyond those ensembles. Lynch strikes me as savvy and realistic, characteristics that are all too rare in entertainment.
Jane Lynch Is A Workaday Goddess
It is one of my big life ambitions to write the definitive profile of Jane Lynch, so I was both happy and slightly disappointed in a gosh-darn-it-someone-beat-me-to-it kind of way to read Mary McNamara's wonderful essay about Lynch in the Los Angeles Times. McNamara writes: