Janine's Ghostbusters accent was borrowed from a real New Yorker friend
Annie Potts gave the Ghostbusters receptionist Janine Melnitz her famous New York twang by copying a friend from the city. She has now played the part across four decades of films and a video game, while also voicing Bo Peep for Pixar and becoming Meemaw on Young Sheldon.
Potts was born in Nashville, Tennessee, on October 28, 1952, the youngest of three sisters, and grew up in Franklin, Kentucky. She cheered for Franklin-Simpson High School, finished there in 1970, and went on to earn a theatre degree at Stephens College in Columbia, Missouri. In 1973 a car crash broke several bones in her lower body, including both legs, and cost her the heel of her right foot; her first husband, Steven Hartley, lost a leg in the same accident.
Her screen debut came five years later in the MGM comedy Corvette Summer opposite Mark Hamill, which brought a Golden Globe nomination. Canada then honoured her with a Genie Award for Heartaches, in which she played a young wife of a stock car racer who is pregnant by his friend. Janine arrived in 1984, and Potts returned to the role for the 1989 sequel, for Ghostbusters: Afterlife in 2021 and for Frozen Empire in 2024. Pretty in Pink, the John Hughes film, gave her another memorable supporting part.
Television made her a household name. On the CBS sitcom Designing Women, which ran from 1986 to 1993, she played the practical interior designer Mary Jo Shively. Love & War earned her a 1994 Emmy nomination, and the Lifetime drama Any Day Now brought two Screen Actors Guild nominations. From 2017 to 2024 she was a regular on Young Sheldon as Connie Tucker, the title character's grandmother, and she carried that role into Georgie & Mandy's First Marriage.
She has also worked well away from the camera. Narrating Larry McMurtry's Telegraph Days won her the 2007 Audie Award for female solo narration. On November 17, 2009, she joined God of Carnage for her Broadway debut, taking over from Hope Davis, and in 2014 she played Berthe in a Pippin revival, her first Broadway musical. Her voice has been heard as Bo Peep in four Toy Story films, starting in 1995.
Source: Annie Potts
