Hollywood's starmakers always are on the lookout for a fresh new face, and they found one, albeit a wrinkled one, in Mae Laborde.
The 97-year-old Laborde is just four years into her acting career and hotter than ever. Standing 4-feet-10, with snow-white hair, rosy-red cheeks and a sweet-as-peaches-and-cream smile, she's becoming TV's ubiquitous grandma.
She was "Wheel of Fortune's" Vanna White (40 years in the future) for a recent episode of "MADtv." She was the stunned fiancee whose boyfriend finally gets around to proposing in a jewelry commercial. She faced down the Grim Reaper himself in a bit about elderly people without health insurance for "Real Time With Bill Maher."
She's also been a cheerleader on ESPN, appeared in a Lexus commercial, had a recurring role on Spike Feresten's "Talkshow" and was 22 in a JP Morgan Chase Bank commercial.
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"Now that one paid good!" says Laborde, eyes twinkling under knitted brows and behind rhinestone glasses. Then, lowering her voice conspiratorially, she adds, "I mean, like a few hundred dollars."
As she speaks, she sits perched on the living room couch of her small Southern California home, just a couple blocks from the beach.
So what's the secret to her late-blooming success? She never had any training and, until four years ago, the closest she came to show business was working as a bookkeeper in the late bandleader Lawrence Welk's office.
"I'm just a natural," she says with a smile as she heads to her dining room table to sift through her press clippings.
Her acting career was started by a 2002 Los Angeles Times story, when columnist Steve Lopez, her former neighbor, decided to seek her out for some lighthearted driving tips.
In those days, she was well known around Santa Monica as the little old lady who barreled up and down her neighborhood's hilly streets and across the freeways in a gigantic 1977 Oldsmobile Delta 88. Laborde, who stopped driving only last year, was so small, and the car so big, Lopez wrote, that behind the wheel she looked like a cricket driving a tank.
His description caught the eye of Sherrie Spillane, the veteran L.A. talent agent and ex-wife of the late crime novelist Mickey Spillane. Spillane decided she had to meet Laborde. The two got together for a tea-leaf reading (Laborde's hobby), and the next thing Spillane knew she had a new client.
Laborde arrived in Los Angeles from her hometown of Fresno at the height of the Great Depression, meeting her husband when he was the conductor on L.A.'s Red Car trolley line that she used to take home from work.
A few years later, her husband and baby daughter in tow, she moved into a tiny house on a street so narrow that cars traveling in opposite directions can't pass if someone has parked at the curb. It was back in the day when Santa Monica was just a quaint little California town of beach cottages.
Seventy years later, many of those cottages have been razed in favor of multimillion-dollar "McMansions," but Laborde's remains unchanged.
