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Kathy Najimy

A dark-haired, vivacious comic character actress with stage experience, Kathy Najimy began her film career playing small, outlandish roles such as a crazed video store customer in Terry Gilliam's "The Fisher King" (1991) and the all-seeing costume mistress in daytime-TV satire "Soapdish" (1991). Her breakout came with her scene-stealing turn as the rotund, maniacally sunny-spirited Sister Mary Patrick in the unexpectedly popular "Sister Act" (1992). She followed this up with her role as the obsequious, ever-hungry Mary Sanderson, one of a trio of witches accidentally reincarnated, in the Disney comedy "Hocus Pocus" (1993) before recreating her religious role in the inevitable sequel, "Sister Act 2: Back in the Habit" (1993). For the sequel, she reportedly demanded and received a million-dollar paycheck. Oddly, other feature film roles did not follow and she was almost entirely off the big screen until Paul Rudnick's romantic comedy-drama "Jeffrey" (1995), in what amounted to a cameo, and "Nevada" (1997), a contemporary Western about a town seemingly populated only by women. Although she remained a steady presence as a character actress in both television and film, Najimy settled into working most often as a voice actress, most notably as suburban Texas wife and mother Peggy Hill on Mike Judge's long-running animated comedy "King of the Hill" (Fox 1997-2010) and in Pixar's ecological fable "WALL-E" (2008).