NEW YORK, NY.- Do you hear Carol Kane before you see her? The voice that can go pipsqueak high or deep rasp, wavering at just the right moment? Or do you imagine first the mass of golden curls, which telegraph unruliness while actually framing exactly what she wants you to experience?

She modulates that distinctive quaver to match the character, too — “whether it should be lower, or denser, or higher, or an accent,” she said. “I work a lot on that. I get it as specific as I can.”

It’s nearly absent in her “Annie Hall” graduate student, and filtered through quiet Yiddish in “Hester Street,” the 1975 immigrant drama that earned her an Oscar nomination at 22. It swings from the pinched cadences of Simka, with her invented language on the sitcom “Taxi,” to the brash Lillian, the batty, mouthy New York landlord on “Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt.”

And in her newest film, the Sundance favorite “Between the Temples,” in which Kane stars opposite Jason Schwartzman, she runs the gamut from vulnerable to sharp — a vocal confidence scale that’s not far from how her own real-life lilt changes. “It depends on the second, the moment, the day,” she said, laughing.

More than an eccentric character study, Kane, 72, who has been acting professionally for nearly 60 years, is actually a deceptively versatile performer who, through friendship and dedication to craft, is connected to Hollywood’s golden age — but also appeared at a sci-fi convention this month. (She joined the second season of “Star Trek: Strange New Worlds” on Paramount+ as an alien engineer with an unplaceable accent — her twist.)

There were long stretches when the phone didn’t ring, then periods such as now, a late renaissance (Kanaissance) when the superlative parts stack up. What she has learned, Kane said in a recent interview, is that in her career, “one thing does not necessarily lead to another — no matter how well-received or successful. It’s kind of a life lesson in a way.”

That she became known for comedy “was a surprise to me,” she said. This despite a four-decade sweep that includes that Emmy-winning performance in “Taxi,” holding her own opposite Andy Kaufman, and scene-stealing moments as a witchy wife in “The Princess Bride” and a fairy abusing Bill Murray in “Scrooged.”

Did she think of herself as funny? Not really. She started in theater and her first film role — at 17 — was in the Mike Nichols drama “Carnal Knowledge.” But she knew enough to heed the call when people such as Gene Wilder, James L. Brooks or Tina Fey beckoned.

“A lot of people are funny-adjacent. And Carol’s really funny,” Fey, a creator of the Netflix series “Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt,” said by phone. “She’s so cuddly, and her eyes are enormous. Her hair is like spaghetti. But, you know, she is very much in control of her timing.” On some level, Fey said, Kane is “a machine inside” who takes a precise approach. “But she’s a proper actor, too,” Fey added. “And so you can get vulnerability and real feeling from her very easily.”

“I think she should have at least two Oscars by now,” Fey said. But “she’s just too sparkly to do drama all the time.”

In “Between the Temples,” directed by indie filmmaker Nathan Silver, she plays Carla, a retired elementary school music teacher who runs into a former student, Ben (Schwartzman), now a cantor, albeit a depressed one who can’t sing. They strike up a friendship (or maybe more) while Carla studies for a deeply belated bat mitzvah. The movie — funny, idiosyncratic, sad, neurotic and, yes, Jewish — hangs on their dynamic as widowers seeking something outside themselves. Many critics have called Kane’s performance among the best of her career.

Silver, who wrote the movie with C. Mason Wells, said he created it for Schwartzman. But it was not until Kane joined that it came into focus. When Schwartzman and Kane met on a video call for a chemistry test, “within a minute, they were comfortable with each other, doing a screwball comedy kind of back-and-forth,” Silver said, “and I knew we had a movie.”

Schwartzman, 44, said he grew up watching — being fascinated by — Kane, and even pictured her “Princess Bride” scene while they were shooting a pivotal moment in “Between the Temples.”

With many of her performances, “I could’ve easily just wished that they made a movie about her character,” he said. “She is mesmerizing as a person, and I think it’s only heightened when she’s on camera.” The May-December love of “Between the Temples” was an easy sell. Audiences, he included, are “just totally seduced by her eyes and her face,” he said. “She could get away with so much if she were a criminal.”

Kane said she did the movie because Schwartzman was attached. “Jason is so subtle and true — I just think he’s so brilliant,” she said.

The story was personal in some ways for Kane, who is also Jewish (but wasn’t bat mitzvahed). It reminded her of her mother, Joy, a composer and music educator who, at 97, still plays the piano daily and who at 55 uprooted her life to move to Paris to study and teach. Kane said she drew on that as inspiration for “someone that, later in life, wanted to learn and become a fuller person.” Today, mother and daughter live together on the Upper West Side, so Kane can care for her mother.

Over a delightful lunch in Manhattan, where Kane ordered prosecco for us both, swore gleefully and ate asparagus with her fingers (after asking if I minded), she seemed most proud to share a poem her mother had just written. She fretted that she couldn’t be away too long. “Carol,” Fey observed, “is a wonderful, wonderful daughter.”

She collects lifelong friendships with co-stars easily. “What took you so long? She’s an important actress!” Billy Crystal, her partner in “The Princess Bride,” said when I called to talk about her. They met years before their 1987 movie, at a party in Jamie Lee Curtis’ West Hollywood apartment. Curtis, Kane and Bette Davis all lived in the same building, and Kane befriended Davis, too.

In “The Princess Bride,” Rob Reiner’s classic fairy-tale comedy, Crystal and Kane are Max and Valerie, a decrepit, bickering couple of potion-sellers, and Kane has one of cinema’s great entrances, screaming “Liaaaarrr!” at her husband as she runs in, white hair flowing. She is on screen for about 90 seconds. And she is indelible.

“It’s just a little jewel in the middle” of the movie, Crystal said.

To prepare, Kane and Crystal met at her apartment, with a copy of William Goldman’s source novel, to invent a backstory for Max and Valerie. “We approached it seriously, so it can be funny,” Crystal said. “You know — they met at some sort of fair, and they had a lot in common. They both like spells.”

The makeup took something like nine hours, and Kane had a really hard time with the prosthetics, she said, finding them claustrophobic. But when they stepped on set and saw each other, “we just giggled, all the time, looking at each other,” Crystal said. And when he riffed, Kane kept up; Reiner had to step away, “because he was laughing too loud.”

Filming at an old-school production facility in England, with costumed players everywhere, they went to lunch at the canteen, still in their getups — and stayed in character. Crystal said: “‘What’s in the mutton? It’s so good.’ ‘Do you really think you should? You know, your cholesterol.’”

“It was just so much fun,” he said. “I hope that we get to do something else together again, because it would be outrageous. Now, we don’t need the makeup.”

Kane’s first, most quotable role might be her breakthrough part, Simka Dahblitz-Gravas, the wife of Kaufman’s mechanic Latka Gravas, on “Taxi.” She arrived several seasons in; after a few guest appearances, she ran into Brooks, a creator of the series, at a party (“I think it was Carrie Fisher and Penny Marshall’s birthday party, which were notorious,” she said), and he asked if she would come back.

The series, a monster hit from 1978 to 1983, shaped her understanding of how to play comedy, she said. She was eager to please, but Brooks told her: “Don’t try to be funny. If we wrote it funny, it would be funny, and if it’s not, we have to fix it.”

“It was like a revelation to hear that I must not try to like, yakka, yakka, yakka,” she said. “I have to always be conscious of the fine line that makes it funny but true.”

It was a high-wire role to step into. Latka was an immigrant from a fictional country; Kaufman, the iconoclastic comedian, made up its gibberish language. He took her out for Chinese food when they started, but they could only communicate in the Gravas tongue. It was about all the preparation she got. “He would say, ‘I understand that you have to rehearse, but I can’t rehearse it,’” she recalled. “We always came to a peace about it.” (When we met, she had a pin with Kaufman’s photo near the hem of her flouncy black coat dress.)

“She was kind of the Andy whisperer, and it made him even more real” as a character, said her co-star Marilu Henner. “She’s so original, and so committed.”

The “Taxi” cast — which also included Danny DeVito, Tony Danza, Judd Hirsch and Christopher Lloyd — was fun-loving, the blast of their studio lot. “Our show did 112 shows, and had 112 parties,” Henner said. “We had softball games, roller disco parties.”

And they are still close. During the pandemic, they started having regular video calls, organized by Henner, and haven’t stopped. “We really love each other. It’s simple,” Kane said.

KANE fell in love with performing instantly — “I was just obsessed,” she said — when she was around 7 and her mother took her to see children’s theater in her native Cleveland. Her family, including an older sister, moved around a lot, with stints in Paris and Haiti, following the career of her father, Michael, who was an architect. When her parents divorced, her mother settled in New York, where Kane attended the Professional Children’s School.

Kane was a late addition to the small cast of “Carnal Knowledge,” Nichols’ 1971 marital drama. Arriving on set, she met the filmmaker and immediately went to see the dailies. Watching beside screenwriter Jules Feiffer and stars Jack Nicholson and Art Garfunkel — she played his teenage girlfriend — “I’m just like what? Just paralyzed with shock, you know?” she said. But Nichols put her at ease.

“The best direction he gave to me was that he let me know — because I was terrified — that I would be enough, that I couldn’t do anything wrong because I was perfect for the part,” she said, and started crying at the memory.

“I loved him so much,” she said, “and that was such a generous way to welcome someone into the world that he was creating.” (Nichols died in 2014.)

She is well aware of how lucky she was, and how boggling and envy-inducing her social circle is. Nicholson and Anjelica Huston became good friends; they took her out to lunch the day after the Oscars, where she lost best actress to Louise Fletcher, from “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” Kane was on unemployment then and didn’t work for a year, until Gene Wilder offered her a part in a daffy romantic satire — her first comedy.

The industry sometimes didn’t know what to do with her uniqueness, Huston wrote in an email. “She’s strong and soft, timid and brave. I think it’s her ability to cross over so fluidly that makes her astonishing.”

They too met at a party (my God, the ’70s!), this time at celebrity hairdresser Ara Gallant’s New York apartment — Kane, Huston, and model Veruschka. “We talked about men, of course,” Huston said, and one another. “I thought Carol was really cool.”

Huston encouraged her casting in “Addams Family Values” (1993), as Granny opposite her own Morticia, and they’d go out to dinner after shooting. “We still talk about men, and ourselves,” she said. (Kane has never married.)

Her friendship with Davis was an only-in-Hollywood meet-cute, when she ran into Davis’ assistant in the laundry room of their building and professed her devoted fandom. “She was the actor that I hope to be able to emulate,” Kane said.

Hours later, a note, on embossed stationery, was slipped under her door: “Come for drinks at 6 — Bette Davis.” Davis met the “Taxi” cast, feted Kane for the Emmys, even celebrated a New Year’s Eve with her and her mother in New York. “My jaw is still on the floor,” Kane said about connecting with her idol.

Now, she is, in many ways, a regular New Yorker and devoted Upper West Sider. (Our lunch was just above 23rd Street, farther downtown than Kane normally ventures, she said.) “She is a magical creature — but she’s not behind some giant, fenced-in community,” said Fey, a neighbor who often had breakfast dates with her. “She is out here, just making it day-to-day like everyone else, like any working actor.”

The low-budget filmmaking of “Between the Temples” — with cast and crew staying in a Best Western in Kingston, New York, and the art department painting props by the lobby — was her speed in some ways, but a challenge in others: It had no real screenplay. Silver prefers “scriptments,” more like a novella, which the filmmakers worked on with Schwartzman and Kane for months before shooting. (The actors added the idea of the teacher-student relationship, to give their characters more context.)

For Kane, the movie reflects what she has learned about her vocation and the pleasures she still finds in acting.

“When I was young,” she said, “I was a perfectionist to the degree where it’s painful. That’s what Bette Davis was. People think she was difficult, but she wasn’t difficult. She just wanted it to be perfect.”

“But that’s a costly way to live your life,” she continued. “I’ve learned, as I grow older, that I have to let a lot go. You have no control about what’s going to happen.” She’s in it for the moment, not the endpoint. “So, I’m enjoying it more.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.