biography
Adrienne began her career in 1963 with the San Jose Civic Light Opera. After graduating high school, she traveled with a musical comedy revue, entertaining our servicemen on Army bases throughout Southeast Asia. In 1965, she moved to New York where she made her Broadway debut as Tevye’s second daughter, Hodel, in Fiddler on the Roof. A Tony nomination and a Theatre World Award for her creation of Rizzo in the original Broadway production of Grease led her back to California and the role of Bea Arthur’s daughter, Carol, in the hit series Maude.
Since then she has become a best selling author, a recording artist, and the star of numerous features, films for television, concert performances, musicals and plays.
Movie fans know her best for her performances in The Fog, Escape From New York, Creepshow, Swamp Thing, Back to School, and Cannonball Run. She appeared in the Academy Award winning ARGO. Her recent releases include Early Retirement, for which she won a Best Supporting Actress Award at the Hollywood Reel Independent Film Festival, Unearth, and Oddities.
Adrienne has a Golden Globe nomination and over 450 screen performances to her credit. She starred as Ruthie, the Snake Dancer, on HBO’s fascinating series, Carnivale. She was Oswald’s mom on Drew Carey, Victoria Grayson’s mom on Revenge, and Venus’s mom on Sons of Anarchy. Daytime viewers know her as Suzanne Stanwyck on General Hospital. Her recent television appearances include Criminal Minds, Grey’s Anatomy, American Horror Stories, and two Netflix series: A.J. and the Queen, starring RuPaul, and Cowboy Be-bop, starring John Cho.
Having starred in over 25 theatrical productions in the U.S. and Canada, Adrienne spent most of 2015 playing Berthe, Pippin’s grandmother, in the National Tour of Pippin, singing “No Time At All” as she hung upside down from a trapeze.
Off camera, Adrienne is the voice of Catwoman in Batman, The Animated Series, Ms. Simone in Scooby-Doo on Zombie Island, and Ginny’s Mom in Curious George Go West, Go Wild. She can be heard in a myriad of video games: God of War, Halo 4, and Fallout 76 among them. She also provides narration for the visually impaired on many films, documentaries, and television series; it’s one of her favorite forms of voiceover work.
Adrienne is the author of four books: the best-selling memoir There Are Worse Things I Could Do; the urban fantasy Vampyres of Hollywood and its comedy romance sequels, Love Bites and Make Me Dead.
Adrienne has just completed work on Harlan Coben’s Shelter for Amazon Prime; an animated version of a very successful super- hero film for Warner Bros; a soon-to-be released new video game; and her fifth book Grease Tell Me More, Tell Me More, in honor of the 50th anniversary of the Broadway musical. Published by Chicago Review Press, proceeds from the book will go to The Actors’ Fund.