Helen Slater

One thing DC does very well is pay tribute to its past. Oh, not the past of the company itself, necessarily (why, hello, Bill Finger!), but the public face, at least. If you’ve once played a DC character in a prominent way, you’re going to be trotted out on a regular basis for the rest of time. Which is how Helen Slater came to be voicing a version of Martha Kent to Dean Cain’s Jonathan Kent in 2016. To the extent that you find yourself wondering, when you see her in something that also has John Shea in it, if it’s based on a DC property you don’t know.

Let’s start here—she’s not related to Christian Slater, even though they played siblings once. They are both from New York, true. However, his parents are an actor and a casting director. Hers are a founding employee of PBS and a nuclear disarmament activist/lawyer. As a teenager, Slater went to the High School of the Performing Arts, attending at about the same time as the movie Fame was released. She maintains a connection with the school; a link to it is on her website.

Within two years of graduation, she was Supergirl. Critics at the time thought she did better as the alter ego than Christopher Reeve had; they had talked about her audition before she went out for the role, even. It’s true that the movie came at the tail end of the early successes of that version of the franchise, but it’s also true that she seems to have come out of it better than, say, Superman IV. She would go on to play Talia al’Ghul in Batman: The Animated Series, not to mention Lara-El, Eliza Danvers, and the aforementioned Martha Kent. DC has kept her in the family.

Beyond that, of course, she’s had a wide and varied career. I think the only thing she’s done that I saw in the theatre was City Slickers, which is a fun role and a fun performance. She’s one of the characters in it that you can imagine having a life worth following outside what’s going on in the story. She was 28 at the time, admittedly fourteen years younger than Daniel Stern but still. She’s given agency. Perhaps not as ferocity as Billie Jean, the one where she leads a youth revolt, but still. Agency.

Slater herself seems fascinating. She has a PhD in Mythological Studies from Pacifica Graduate Institute. She’s put out several albums of music she wrote herself. She and Gina Gershon are listed as co-founders of the Naked Angels, a theatrical troupe. She’s also listed as having founded another troupe with her husband, Robert Watzke. Her personal website—which is attractive and understated; I like it—shares some of the philanthropic work she’s associated with. Also a link to the abstract of her PhD thesis. It’s a heck of a thing.