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Did you know that Veronica Cartwright was a child actor? A long, long time ago, on shows that were new before we were born, like Leave It to Beaver, The Mod Squad, and Dr. Kildare. Which is weird for us to contemplate, since we can only imagine the child Cartwright with her present-day head on, like, Dakota Fanning's body, bobbling madly as she bugs out her eyes and delivers small-minded or seemingly paranoid schizophrenic diatribes, just in a higher-pitched version of her distinctively scratchy voice. So really what we're saying is that we picture Cartwright playing her Witches of Eastwick character, but in the Cleavers' black and white living room. And then she throws up a whole barrelful of cherry pits and June has to vacuum them all up. (In pearls and heels.)

Veronica Cartwright is, to us, the kind of celebrity who seems fixed permanently at one age, so that we can't imagine her either older or younger. Cartwright is fifty-four, in actuality, but to us she always has been and always will be around forty-two. In fact, if you think of her professional persona as stuck permanently in early mid-life, then you can explain away what seems to be her constant bad attitude as a side effect of menopause: Cartwright seems to specialize in characters who are either irredeemably crabby or are teetering right on the very edge of a nervous breakdown. (Or have tipped over the edge and totally lost their shit.)

Cartwright's natural twitchiness suits her ideally to play women to whom weird shit has happened in the past, leaving her skittish and hysterical. In the aforementioned Eastwick, she's the one person to recognize that there is a dark and potentially evil presence in her town, though no one believes her. In a recurring role on L.A. Law, she was a prosecutor experiencing recovered memories of childhood sexual abuse. In another recurring role on The X-Files, she's an alien abductee who also gave birth to Cigarette Smoking Man Jr. ("Cigarette Smoking Boy"?) In her tiny role in the current Kinsey, she's the repressed wife of a super-Puritan preacher man. (She's also the mother of the gigantic Liam Neeson, so you have to figure that a teeny woman like her was laid up in bed with a broken pelvis for a while after delivering offspring that huge.) In Cartwright's uncredited role in last year's Just Married, she's..."Pussy." That's her character's name. If that's not the kind of thing that warps a person for life, we certainly don't know what is.

And, remember Veronica Cartwright in Alien? All freaking out, like she'd never seen a reptilian extraterrestrial burst through a dude's chest before? ...Okay, fine -- she wasn't just flying wildly off the handle with that one; there isn't really any way to prepare for that possibility, and we can't all be Sigourney Weaver. But Cartwright has also played a lot of characters who could concievably pull themselves out of their unfortunate circumstances as Alien's Lambert couldn't because she was stuck on a spaceship with a homicidal...you know. But Marceline "Marcy" Jones in Guyana Tragedy: The Story of Jim Jones, a.k.a. The Mad Messiah? Or Olive Osmond in Inside The Osmonds? You guys, just pack a bag and bolt in the night, so you're not a party to either mass suicide or five-part Mormon harmony.