In the case of Imelda Staunton, who plays Elliot's horribly overbearing Russian -
Jewish immigrant mother, she's such a stock caricature that the bottom drops out of the movie every time she waddles into view, and, as Elliot's father, Henry Goodman is only slightly less stock.
Weisz, 48, was raised in a «very liberal
Jewish» household, her engineer father an
immigrant from Hungary, her
mother an Austrian Catholic who later converted.