Celebrity Biographies
Zelda Rubenstein
Who does not remember the short medium with the flute voice, who nevertheless seemed to have the grim Poltergeist situation under control? Actress Zelda Rubinstein passed away on January 27, 2010 at the age of 76 at a Los Angeles hospital. She had been having health problems for a few months, as she had suffered a heart attack, and she had kidney and lung failure.
Born on May 28, 1933 in Pittsburgh (Pennsylvania), Zelda Rubinstein was the youngest of three children. She was the only one who had growth problems due to a deficiency in the pituitary gland, so she was 1.30 meters tall.
After a long stint living in London, Zelda entered the entertainment industry very late, when she was 47, as a voice actor for a character from The Flintstones . She soon after played a minor character in Under the Rainbow , a forgotten Chevy Chase comedy . But it was her portrayal in Poltergeist , as the medium Tangina Barrons, that made Zelda Rubinstein world-renowned. The actress repeated her character in two sequels that were much inferior to the original.
However, she was typecast, and due to her peculiar physique, it was not easy to get many roles, so her career hardly had any greater significance. She was an organist in the teen film classic Sixteen Candles , and the domineering mother of a dangerous psychopath in the film that is shown in a cinema of Bigas Luna ‘s atypical Anguish (1987) . She was also one of the leads in the television series Picket Fences .
Zelda Rubinstein always took her height with humor. “I consider myself pretty condensed,” she’d said herself. She was also a prominent activist in campaigns against AIDS, a disease that caused the death of some of her best friends.