Of the five performers named after the title only Lorraine Gary gets a single credit. She was, in fact, the first to be cast in the movie and Spielberg claims that he had been particularly impressed by her performance in the Joseph Sargent-directed TV movie The Marcus-Nelson Murders, a true-life police drama that served as the unofficial pilot for the hit cop show Kojak. It probably helped that she was also the wife of Sid Sheinberg, who as President of Universal had given the fledgling Spielberg his first television assignments.
Jaws was Gary's first big screen role and it came after almost a decade of supporting and guest starring parts in shows such as Ironside, Kojak, Night Gallery, McCloud, McMillan and Wife, and Marcus Welby M.D., all products of Universal's Seventies TV production line. The actress made no attempt to capitalise on the success of the movie in the way that Roy Scheider did - she played the part of Hysterical Lady in the comedy Car Wash (1976) and the equally hysterical Joan Douglas in 1941 (1979), and then reprised the role of Ellen Brody (slightly hysterical) in Jaws 2 (1979) before retiring from the profession.
Quite what persuaded her to come out of retirement eight years later for Jaws: The Revenge is something of a mystery. Maybe she just liked playing hysterical women, maybe she felt she owed it to her husband to revive the studio's franchise, maybe she wanted a holiday in the Bahamas, maybe she felt she owed director Joseph Sargent something for kick-starting her brief movie career, or maybe - just maybe - she was after an above-the-title screen credit.
