Bunny Levine, the actress who appeared in Gilmore Girls, Thelma and You Don’t Mess With the Zohan, died Thursday at her home in Tarzana, California. She was 97 and died peacefully in her sleep.
Her death closes a long career that reached into her 90s, with credits across television and film that also included Law & Order, Everybody Loves Raymond, Ugly Betty, Private Practice, Criminal Minds, 2 Broke Girls, Raising Hope, Southland, New Girl, Getting On, The Mindy Project, Fuller House, Shameless and Dave. Her film work also stretched from Slime City and The Jimmy Show to A Thousand Words, La La Land and a later reunion with Adam Sandler in Sandy Wexler and You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah.
Levine was born on Dec. 22, 1928, in East Orange, New Jersey, and spent 25 years as a school librarian while raising her three children. She had been interested in acting since she was young, but she set that goal aside for decades before retirement gave her time to begin taking acting classes and auditioning for roles. After her husband, Bernard Levine, died in 2003, she moved to Los Angeles and started building the second career that eventually made her a familiar face on TV and in movies.
That career carried into the last few years of her life. She appeared in The Invisible Raptor in 2023, Sacramento and Thelma in 2024, and more recently in the final season of The Upshaws and The Cure this year. What remains unanswered is not whether Levine kept working — she did — but how many viewers saw her without knowing her name, a common fate for a character actress whose work was everywhere and whose roles were rarely the point.
