Actress Tovah Feldshuh on Playing RBG and Meeting the Justice in Her Chambers

On Sept. 18, hours after Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died, a memory popped up on my Facebook page. It was a photograph I had taken of actress Tovah Feldshuh in the lobby of the Wallis Annenberg Performing Arts Center in Beverly Hills. The photo was taken after I interviewed Feldshuh on opening night of the West Coast premiere of the play “Sisters in Law” by Jonathan Shapiro — on Sept. 18, 2019.

In it, Feldshuh plays the Notorious RBG opposite Stephanie Faracy’s Justice Sandra Day O’Connor. During that interview, Feldshuh told me she was excited because she was going to meet RBG in her chambers the following month. One year later, Feldshuh agreed to speak about that meeting.

“Like the country, I was shattered [by Ginsburg’s death],” Feldshuh said in a phone interview from the Hamptons on Long Island, N.Y. “Obviously, I’m sharing what we all feel — that we’ve lost a humble woman with a great sense of profound justice and liberty for all.” 

During that 2019 interview at the Wallis, Feldshuh said, “How do we honor a woman who is soft-spoken, shy, modest and just decent and moral?” It’s something Feldshuh was deeply concerned about, especially “because I’m about as shy as a tank coming toward you.” 

It was that tank-like mindset that prompted Feldshuh to reach out to Ginsburg after she landed the role in “Sisters in Law.”

“I wrote her a very professional loving letter,” Feldshuh said. “I wrote, ‘I know how extraordinarily occupied you are with the great matters of the United States of America and making sure there is justice for all. I, however, have been given this extraordinary opportunity where I will be playing you. I will be your messenger out in the theatrical universe. Is there any way you would meet with me? I just need to be in the room with you, to have a cellular interchange, to take you in.”

Ginsburg did indeed respond. “I got an email back via her aide,” Feldshuh recalled. It said, “ ‘Dear Ms. Feldshuh, I received your lovely letter. Please be in my chambers on Oct. 23 at 4:30 sharp.’ I just couldn’t believe it.” 

It would be the first of at least four occasions that Feldshuh spent time with Ginsburg. During that first meeting, Feldshuh got to spend an hour alone with the justice. “Her two aides escorted me into this gorgeous mahogany-paneled room,” Feldshuh recalled, “with all the pictures of her family. And it made me think of on my Steinway, and in my living room on my hearth, there are all the pictures of my family. I don’t claim to be anywhere near as extraordinary as Ruth Bader Ginsburg but there are certain values that people can share and certain values that people share as Jews that was clear about her office and was clear about my life. It was as if we had come from the same pod, just a generation apart.”

“I said, ‘Please forgive me. I’m so very moved to meet you, having spent so much time on you and watching you from afar and with all the research I’ve been doing. Seeing you in the flesh is like moving from a book of illustrations to the real deal.’ ” — Tovah Feldshuh

Feldshuh, 66, also recalled when she finally met Ginsburg she teared up. “I said, ‘Please forgive me. I’m so very moved to meet you, having spent so much time on you and watching you from afar and with all the research I’ve been doing. Seeing you in the flesh is like moving from a book of illustrations to the real deal.’ ”

Knowing of the justice’s love of opera, Feldshuh went to the Metropolitan Opera shop and bought Ginsburg a jacket from ‘Der Rosenkavalier,’ and gave it to her at that meeting. “She was thrilled with it,” Feldshuh said, “and told me she was going to wear it to the opening of the Washington Opera [season], which she did.” 

So, what did the two women talk about during that hour in chambers?  

“We talked about opera and we talked about gender equality,” Feldshuh said. “We talked about how early in her life she had a purpose, and her very intimate relationship with her mother and the loss of her mother (Ginsburg’s mother died of cancer the day before Ginsburg’s high school graduation), and [probably] carrying on her mother’s torch.”

And although Feldshuh signed a nondisclosure agreement before that meeting, now that the justice is dead, Feldshuh said she can talk about “generalities” they discussed, which included “sharing with me some of the intimate details of her life — the type of perfume she liked, the shampoo she used, the brands of lipstick she liked [which] were whatever her roommate from Cornell [University] had sent her last.”  

Feldshuh said Ginsburg also spoke about the fact that she didn’t have pierced ears, that she hadn’t cooked since 1980 — that her late husband, Marty Ginsburg, was her chef par excellence, and that marrying him was the luckiest moment of her life. “I also learned she loved mangos, Granny Smith apples, bananas, raspberries and strawberries, and that she didn’t eat ice cream because she didn’t want to digest fat.”

Feldshuh came to that meeting with books for Ginsburg to sign, which she did. She showed the justice photographs of her grandson Raphael. Later, Ginsburg sent Raphael a T-shirt that said “Grand Clerk of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.”

What stood out most to Feldshuh about Ginsburg was “that as humble and as quiet as she appeared, she was intellectually fierce and not intellectually shy. Ruth was a tiny woman but as they say in [Shakespeare’s] ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream,’ ‘though she be but little, she was fierce.’ She was this voracious learner, a voracious reader. She entered the minds of other people the way normal people enter the hearts of other people.”

On a personal level, Feldshuh said Ginsburg “gave me tremendous help in my characterization of her in “Sisters in Law,” which was supposed to come to New York but then COVID happened and that was the end of that for now.”

However, she has managed to play Ginsburg again in her one-woman show “Aging Is Optional,” which played in New York in January and February before COVID-19 shut down that, too. In that show, she said, “With a wink in my eye, I did a rap as RBG, which is one of the great moments of that concert.” 

And, in true Feldshuh style, she broke into the rap down the phone, complete with beatboxing:

I’m always optimistic, I never get rattled
Each day’s an opportunity to win another battle
Don’t worry about my health, I’m performing at my peak
You’ll find me on the bench, doing pushups next week
According to Twitter I’m  notorious
I’ve gone viral, ain’t it glorious
I’ve much in common with B.I.G.
We’re homies from Brooklyn, Yo, Jay-Z!

“I did what I could to support a great American soul — a great patriot,” Feldshuh said. “I loved her very much and I will  miss her. Considering all the cancer she had, she lived brilliantly and was alert. She never had dementia. She lived until she died; until she fell off that cliff. She didn’t diminish except in the last weeks.” 

Despite the great loss of Ginsburg and the turmoil now swirling around her potential replacement, Feldshuh said, “I believe in Anne Frank. The world will right itself and this person in the White House will be out and we will get well again.”