Nora Dunn and Kevin Dunn Are Siblings!

It’s true! I’ve been fans of them both for about 40 years, and never knew until recently that Nora Dunn (b. 1952) and Kevin Dunn (b. 1956) are sister and brother.

And of course once you learn that it makes perfect sense. They’re both Irish with Chicago accents. They even look like siblings, though Nora is gorgeous and chic and Kevin is sort of homely and weather-beaten. And of course they’re both really funny.

Nora came out of Second City and joined Saturday Night Live for the 1985 season. That was the lame season where Lorne Michaels hired a bunch of established people from movies (Joan Cusack, Anthony Michael-Hall, Randy Quaid, Robert Downey Jr) then had to fire them all (along with a couple of other newbies at the end of the season (despite the fact they’re all fine performers) because they didn’t fit the show. Dunn was one of the few remained for the next season, along with Dennis Miller, Jon Lovitz, A. Whitney Brown, and the returned Al Franken. Her most successful character was a vapid talk show host named Pat Stevens, and a lot of her characters seemed variations on that basic trunk. She also played the mom in the “Wayne’s World” sketches when Mike Myers and Dana Carvey joined the cast, and she did a funny bit with Jan Hooks as a couple of terrible singers called the Sweeney Sisters. She specialized in doing impressions of women who were sort of monstrous horrors, battle axes like Jeanne Kirkpatrick, Imelda Marcos, and Leona Helmsley, and columnists like Cindy Adams and Ann Landers. She had a real satirical bent and she was one of my favorite cast members at the time. It was no surprise at all when she put her foot down along with Sinead O’Connor and wouldn’t appear on the show when Andrew Dice Clay was a guest — I was really pissed that the other cast members didn’t stand up in solidarity with her.

She left the show after that (1990). By then she had made her film debut in Working Girl (1988). Later films she appeared in included John Sayles‘ Passion Fish (1992), Warren Beatty’sBulworth (1998), Three Kings (1999), Ben Stiller’s Zoolander (2001), The Hebrew Hammer, Bruce Almighty and Charles Busch’sDie, Mommy, Die (all in 2003), Pineapple Express (2008), Nancy Meyers’ It’s Complicated (2009), The Guilt Trip (2012), and dozens more, plus constant work on television throughout the decades. In recent years she’s directed lots of live theatre at major venues like Steppenwolf.

There is a TERRIFIC interview with her on Salon.com from 2015. Man, she comes across as so smart, and level headed and decent. I’m pretty sure I’ve never come across another SNL alum interview as sane, balanced, coherent, fair, or evocative as this one is. Read it here.

Kevin Dunn began getting film and tv roles almost as soon as his older sister came into the spotlight. While he’s done plenty of great comedy, he’s less exclusively associated with than Nora, and he’s had some great roles in dramatic films. Stocky and a little bullish looking, he’s often cast as cops, FBI men, military guys, and the like. He was extremely well cast as the abusive father Murry Wilson in The Beach Boys: An American Family (2000), for example. He played J. Edgar Hoover in Chaplin (1992) and Chuck Colson in Nixon (1995). Today he’s probably best known for being a key member of the ensemble on Veep (2013-19). He co-starred with Bette Midler on her short-lived sit-com Bette (2000). His movies include Mississippi Burning (1988); Ghostbusters II (1989); De Palma’sBonfire of the Vanities (1990), Snake Eyes (1998) and The Black Dahlia (2006); Only the Lonely (1991); Hot Shots! (1991), 1492: Conquest of Paradise (1992), Dave (1993), Beethoven’s 2nd (1993), Godzilla (1998), Almost Heroes (1998), I Heart Huckabees (2004), the Transformers movies, Vicky Christina Barcelona (2008), and a bunch else, plus all the tv shows.

Okay, I think this post is Dunn.