Here’s What Happened to ‘Everybody Loves Raymond’ Star Doris Roberts Before and After the Show

The history of Classic TV sitcoms is filled with meddling mothers and mother-in-laws, but all of them need to take a step back and nod their heads in respect to Everybody Loves Raymond’s Marie Barone, brought to masterful life by the late Doris Roberts. Throughout the show’s 1996 to 2005 run, this pint-sized lady packed a lot of power in her bark that caused everyone else to fear getting on her bad side. At the same time, she provided innumerable laughs for the audience.

“It’s wonderful writing, but I also credit myself for what I did, because she is a Virgo,” Doris related to the Television Academy Foundation. “If you play her that way as written, she is a control freak. She’s a pain in the neck — and I’ve raised the area of the anatomy above that — and a buttinski. I mean, she’s so many things that are annoying, but I make you laugh. The smart thing that I’ve done as the character is making her a cross between [co-creators] Ray Romano’s mother, who was an Italian American, and Phil Rosenthal’s, who was a German Jew. Now, from my point of view, the German Jew is cerebral and the Italian American is visceral. So I’ve combined those two and that’s why you laugh at me. If you didn’t, if you found her to be too much, you wouldn’t find her funny.”

Doris recognized how important Marie was to the show’s scripts, because, as she describes it, she was the middle of the wheel: more or less everything came back to her. “How I treat my son, how I treat my daughter-in-law, how I treat the other brother who feels that I don’t love him as much as this one, how I treat Peter Boyle … all of that goes back to the mother. If you take her out of it, what have you got? You have a husband trying to get his wife to give him more sex. You have a brother who’s angry and feels major sibling rivalry. This was much more than that.”

And there was much more to Doris Roberts, which you’ll discover by scrolling down.