Remember My Big Fat Greek Wedding? Remember the lovable mother in it?
The actress who portrayed her is Lainie Kazan. And she was arrested on Christmas Eve.
For shoplifting just $ 180 worth of groceries.
Lainie Kazan isn’t quite a household name, but she’s almost certainly best-known for one outstanding role.
She played the larger-than-life mom in My Big Fat Greek Wedding. She portrayed this compassionate yet traditional but also loud and pushy matriarch.
That film was a huge success, raking in hundreds of millions as an indie film.
And she reprised the role in My Big Fat Wedding 2 just last year.
It’s worth noting that Lainie Kazan has had a cultural impact beyond that one role.
Big Barda is a reasonably well known, if not A-List, DC superhero.
Inspiration for her character — a tall, busty female warrior who is almost inescapably strong — came from a topless spread that Lainie Kazan had done for Playboy, many decades ago.
She’s never portrayed Barda, but she’ll always be the woman whose photos inspired the character.
Unfortunately, Kazan’s Christmas Eve arrest isn’t exactly the kind of conduct that you’d hope to see from the inspiration behind a member of the Justice League.
TMZ reports that Lainie Kazan was arrested for shoplifting on Sunday, Christmas Eve.
She allegedly placed $ 180 worth of groceries into reusable bags and marched them out of the store, taking them out to her car.
Someone in the store called the police, who arrested her for petty theft and released her without bail.
Actors have shoplifted before — sometimes they have an irresistible compulsion to do so.
What’s shocking about this story is Kazan’s explanation for why she stole the food.
According to TMZ‘s sources, Lainie explained to the police that she’d had no money on her — and that she is in fact destitute.
You don’t normally hear this sort of thing about people who were in a film that grossed over $ 240 million at the US box office.
Sure, plenty of stars get into massive debt, but it generally means that they have to sell their impulsively purchased castles and some spare mansions, not that they literally cannot buy food.
And while we’ve heard plenty of heartwarming stories about police officers buying groceries for desperate shoplifters instead of arresting them, clearly this was not one of those situations.
(To be fair to the police involved, feel good stories are one thing, but there’s a lot of scrutiny when it comes to how police treat even minor celebrities)
While shoplifting some food isn’t a serious offense, it sounds like Lainie Kazan’s situation is.
Though she has dozens of roles in films and television under her belt, she might really be in over her head. Maybe her royalty deals for contracts suck. Maybe she outspent what she’s been making.
Perhaps her health costs have been through the roof. We know that Kazan was injured in a head-on collision back in April of 2016.
But that’s just one guess at one potential cause. Sometimes, good people who are okay at managing their finances get caught in a perfect storm of misfortune.
And they end up stealing some food from a grocery store in the Valley.
