Meet the New Action Movie Star — She’s 94

Tom Cruise, 61, has nothing on June Squibb, 94. In the highly entertaining Thelma (in theaters June 21), she plays the title part, a phone-scam victim who watches Mission: Impossible and decides to get her $10,000 back from her scammer. Fearless as Cruise’s Ethan Hunt, Thelma pursues the bad guy, and grabs the motorized scooter of a friend, played by Shaft star Richard Roundtree in one of his last roles — “a sexy grandpa,” says Squibb. 

The filmmakers wanted to use a stunt double, but Squibb insisted on doing most of her own stunts, except when Thelma pulls a wheelie on the scooter, which she doesn’t know how to do. “I did a lot of the action, rolling over, crossing streets with cars, banging into Richard [on a second scooter].”

Squibb is a late-blooming star with a career that makes one cheer. At 30, she debuted on Broadway as the stripper Electra in Gypsy, opposite Ethel Merman. Her costume had bulbs that lit up as she sang, “I’m electrifying /​ And I ain’t even tryin’ / If you wanna make it / Twinkle while you shake it!” Once, an electrician had to repair a loose wire just before she went onstage so she didn’t zap herself. At 60, she got more electrifying news: She auditioned for three films and got all of them: Woody Allen’s Alice, Scent of a Woman with Al Pacino and Martin Scorsese’s The Age of Innocence.

At 84, she played the tart-tongued wife of Bruce Dern in Nebraska. She stole her scenes with him, and the film reignited both of their careers. One fan smooched her cheek in a grocery store checkout line. “At Cannes Film Festival, we’d walk into a bar and people were clapping and whispering about us,” says Squibb. “We were just the talk of the town. Frightening in a way, but you also feel, well, I’m not crazy. I knew I should be doing this. And a lot of other people are now saying, ‘Yes, you should be doing this.’ ” You may have seen her in Girls, Glee, Shameless and The Big Bang Theory.

Now, at 94, she’s got her first lead role, in Thelma. “It’s based on [director] Josh Margolin’s grandmother, Thelma Post,” says Squibb. Post was fooled by a phone scammer impersonating Margolin, claiming to need bail money. “She was scammed, but they caught it before she sent money,” Squibb explains. “Josh said she would have done anything to get her money back.”

Squibb was so good with Dern in Nebraska that they both got Oscar nominations. Her more affectionate chemistry with Roundtree in Thelma was evident on-screen and off. On her birthday during the shoot, Roundtree gave her two dozen roses. Roundtree’s oldest daughter told her that he would come home and say, “Oh, that June Squibb is kicking ass!” Her decades of dancing and treading the boards on Broadway (most recently in Waitress, 2018) paid off.