CAROLINE AARON: A Mom Who Plays Moms Inspired by Her Mom

Send us Fan MailCaroline Aaron knows from motherhood.   She’s a mom.  As an actor, she’s played plenty of moms, long before she got the mom role for which she is best known, Shirley Maisel in “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.”  She’s currently playing a mom in the off-Broadway show “Conversations With Mother.”  But her own mother’s story might be the most compelling of all: a Jew from Selma, Alabama who got married and raised three kids in Richmond, Virginia. Caroline’s father died young, and Caroline watched as her widowed mom got a job as the lone white professor at the historically black college Virginia Union University, all the while advocating for civil rights in the Jim Crow south.  That may sound like a world away from the world of the character Shirley Maisel.  But lessons learned long ago in Richmond have been the ties that bind throughout Caroline Aaron’s long and fulfilling career.