At the sight of Carol Kane's face, film critics dust off more descriptive labels- "Pre-Raphaelite," "a Botticelli," "a Van Ecyk type"- than art historians in the Louvre. As the flaky, funny Annie Valentine in the hit comedy The World's Greatest Lover, Carol, 25, earned better reviews than her co-star, Gene Wilder (to whom she bears an uncanny physical resemblence). As a late-blooming comedienne, Carol seems finally to have shed the saucer-eyed persona of Hester Street's fragile Gitl, the role that got her a 1976 Oscar nomination- as well as typecast. "People think of me as ethereal and wispy," complains the 5'2", 105-pound Kane. "I'd like to let some anger out and be a bitch."
After 11 years of psychoanalysis, foot-stomping generally isn't Kane's style. An omnipresent actress, she has played with Jack Nicholson in The Last Detail), Woody Allen (as his highbrow first wife in Annie Hall) and even Rudolf Nureyev in Valentino. "Ive's only met two women I'd work with continually," says Wilder, "Madeline Kahn and Carol Kane." Yet Carol admits ruefully to such a tantrum that she "demolished a wardrobe lady" during rehearsals in Long Beach for a current revival of The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds. In the just wrapped Clouds, she portrays a violent psychotic who beats an orangutan to death with a chain. Kane became so intense in that scene that the frightened orangutan bit her left ankle, resulting in a tetanus shot.
Predictably, Kane's nonstop acting credits have impoverished her personal life. "At the moment, work is the healthiest part of my life," she admits. "If I were healthier in a more rounded way and had a good personal relationship, I'm sure I would feel alive with that. At one time I wanted a baby very badly," she goes on, "It didn't matter to me if it had a father- I'd love it enough. it was only becasue I got involved with such neurotic men that I didn't have a baby." Whom is she seeing now? "It's nobody's business." Which translates to "nobody special."
As a child in Cleveland, acting was Kane's first therapy. "I was obsessed with death," Carol remembers. "I read obituaries all the time. If my mother went to the supermarket and wasn't back two minutes later, she was definitely dead. My reaction wasn't normal." At 7, she put on plays and "screamed at all the kids in the neighborhood because they didn't take it seriously enough."
When Carol was 13, her architect father and singer-pianist mother were divorced after the family had lived in Cleveland, Paris, Haiti and New York. "We loved each other," she says, "but it was an unhappy household." Carol ended up in Cherry Lawn boarding school in Connecticut and by 14 was in psychoanalysis. (She suffered from recurring nightmares about close friends falling downstairs or being crushed to death by cars.) Later she dropped out of New York's Bernard Baruch College because "I never did understand about schools." (Similarly, she says, "Mass taste is beyond me.")
By that time, she'd gone on tour with Tammy Grimes in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. She moved off-Broadway and even to Boston for plays like Bertold Brecht's The Resistable Rise of Arturo Ui with one of her heroes, Al Pacina. The movie role as Art Garfunkel's hippie girlfriend in Carnal Knowledge "gave me my start." Then brief but memorable appearances in films like Dog Day Afternoon established Kane as what she calls the "cameo queen."
She laments, "I don't have any social life outside of work." But, she adds, "I just don't drift around the closet. I love to smoke, eat and be with people. A vegetarian since 14, she knocks about her New York and Sunset Strip apartments in second-hand chic. Her closest friends are other actors- Jane Hallaren, John Cazale and Diane Keaton. She sees herself as a misfit but says, "I don't mourn it. I celebrate it. I want there to be only one of me. I'm definitely vulnerable. But being vulnerable doesn't mean I'm not strong."
Photographs by Jim McHugh/Sygma

The article is accompanied by a small black and white photo of Gene Wilder and Carol in a scene from their picture- In the World's Greatest Lover, Gene Wilder was Kane's co-star/director. "He gave me a lot of self-confidence.; A small black and white photo of Carol and Shelley Winters seated at a table in the play "Marigolds"- Carol is playing the 13-year-old daughter of Shelley Winters (left) in a pre-Broadway run of Paul Zindel's Marigolds. Says Winters: "She's intelligent and gifted."; A one page black and white photo of Caro with hat and coat- "My looks are not common," admits Carol Kane. "That has gotten me attention, even if it wasn't always the kind I wanted."