Lainie Kazan

Kazan was born Lainie Levine in Brooklyn as the daughter of Carole (née Kazan) and Benjamin Levine. Kazan\'s mother Carole was of Sephardic Jewish extraction, her family having originally come from Jerusalem; and her father Benjamin, who was of Russian Ashkenazi Jewish descent, worked as a gambling bookmaker. Kazan has described her mother as "neurotic, fragile and artistic." She attended Brooklyn\'s Erasmus Hall High School, where she was a senior while Barbra Streisand, whom she would later understudy, was a sophomore. Kazan went on to graduate from Hofstra University in Hempstead, New York, on Long Island, in 1960. While at Hofstra, Kazan appeared in school musicals written and directed by a classmate, future Academy Award-winning director Francis Ford Coppola.\n', '

Kazan made her Broadway debut in 1961 with the musical The Happiest Girl in the World. She appeared the following year…