Sandra Bernhard

Sandra Bernhard is an American comedian, actress, and singer who broke through playing the stalker Masha in Martin Scorsese's The King of Comedy (1982), winning the National Society of Film Critics Award for Best Supporting Actress. She went on to play Nancy Bartlett -- one of the first openly bisexual recurring characters on a US sitcom -- on Roseanne (1991) for 33 episodes, and staged the one-woman show Without You I'm Nothing (1990) and its film adaptation, alongside a long, complicated, celebrated friendship with Madonna in the early 1990s. She has been openly queer throughout her career, resisting labels for decades and occupying a space of defiant sexual fluidity that was genuinely transgressive at the time. She has since released three studio albums, authored three books, and hosted the SiriusXM show Sandyland for a decade, and remains one of the most distinctive queer voices in American entertainment.