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At some point during her run on “The Big Bang Theory,” Melissa Rauch, who plays Bernadette Rostenkowski-Wolowitz — a pint-sized, fierce waitress turned microbiologist who ends up wooing and marrying Simon Helberg’s Howard Wolowitz on the series — surprised her colleagues with a spot-on impersonation. Specifically, Rauch could do a perfect impression of Carol Ann Susi, the actress who played the rarely seen but often heard Mrs. Wolowitz, Howard’s commanding and domineering mother (with whom Howard lives until he moves in with Bernadette).

“I never impersonated her voice on set, so they wouldn’t have known,” Rauch explained in Jessica Radloff’s 2022 book “The Big Bang Theory: The Definitive, Inside Story of the Epic Hit Series,” where she and other cast and crew members from the show opened up about Susi, her distinctive voice, and how Rauch’s Bernadette ended up using the same voice to speak to Howard in moments of extreme duress. “I would have been afraid to insult her. But honestly, I didn’t know that I could do it until I gave it a try when I saw it in the script.” Rauch’s husband Winston once heard her practicing it in their kitchen and frantically ran in thinking she was hurt, because he could hear her screaming in the voice. “And since we shared a pretty thin wall with our neighbors at the apartment we were living in, I realized I had to practice any Mrs. Wolowitz lines alone in my car so I didn’t alarm anyone else going forward!”

“Melissa was amazing at it! It reminds him of his mother, which is weird and funny and understandable,” writer and executive producer Steve Molaro recalled. “Howard’s basically going to marry his mother.”

Rauch came up with her own incredibly specific voice for Bernadette, and all of this helped the character transform throughout the show. “Over time, we made Bernadette somewhat nefarious,” co-creator Chuck Lorre told Radloff. “She was a cutthroat corporate character. You didn’t mess with her.” Lorre noted that her voice was “a wonderful instrument,” describing the sound of it like “a piccolo on acid.” He continued: 

And then, she’s tiny. So those two things juxtaposed with this balls-to-the-wall killer woman who doesn’t even think twice about cutting some moral corners to get things done … it was joyful to watch. The character became so much more than what was originally created.” 

Part of that transformation is, frankly, the fact that Bernadette starts (unconsciously, in the narrative) mimicking Susi’s voice as Mrs. Wolowitz … so Molaro is right in that Howard basically marries his mom.

There’s no question that Carol Ann Susi’s distinctive voice left a huge impression on both the creative team and viewers of “The Big Bang Theory.” As Steve Molaro put it, “There came a point, pretty early on, where Carol Ann had such a distinct voice, and it was so much fun to imagine who this woman was. It could never live up to what might have been in your head.” As it happens, Melissa Rauch and Simon Helberg were pretty fond of her in real life, too (which does explain why the former was a little afraid to imitate her voice on set).

“She was like this bite-sized person, and you could see the top of her head sometimes over the furniture as she would wrestle around to get backstage,” Helberg recalled (which is another amusing connection between Mrs. Wolowitz and Bernadette when you consider that Chuck Lorre described Rauch as “tiny”). As Lorre tells it, they’d sit Susi in a chair behind a wall or somewhere else off-screen, and there were times the team would go for lunch and say, “Where’s Carol Ann? Did anyone break her?” and realize she was still sitting at her post, waiting to be excused for lunch. “What she did was actually very complicated. The nuance she could bring, even with her decibel level always being at the pitch of a screaming eagle hurling from the sky, plus her execution and timing was so spot-on,” Lorre said. “It’s a real challenge to do that without being able to see anybody.”

“She sounded like so many people in my family, because of her authentic East Coast vibe,” Rauch said, fondly remembering her off-screen co-star. “One of the first things she said to me was something along the lines of ‘So! You’re the new woman in my son’s life!’ She was so hilarious. There was just never a dull moment with her.”

Not only did Melissa Rauch have a spot-on impression of Carol Ann Susi in her back pocket, but the two also spent quite a bit of time together when they weren’t filming … because as Rauch told Jessica Radloff, she often gave Susi a ride home when they were done for the day. “She never got a driver’s license, so she would take the bus all the way to Warner Bros. with all her bags. But she loved it,” Rauch recalled. “She was like, ‘I’m not going to drive in this city with all the crazies!’ If we finished work around the same time, I would take her home and we would have all these really great conversations.”

Sadly, Susi passed away in 2014 — which means that, on “The Big Bang Theory,” Mrs. Wolowitz also passed away around that time — and the cast was left to mourn her both on- and off-screen. “I had never seen a celebration of someone’s life like her memorial,” Rauch told Radloff. “For the one on set, we all gathered on the stage and told our favorite Carol Ann stories through our tears. And Johnny and Molaro put up the little picture of her on the refrigerator in Sheldon and Leonard’s apartment, which remained until the very end of the series.”

“We wanted her to be in every episode from then on, so we knew Sheldon and Leonard’s refrigerator was the best place to do that,” Steve Molaro said of this sweet gesture. As Simon Helberg put it, it was the perfect way to quietly honor Susi … because the audience wouldn’t recognize her face. “I would look at it often, and it was nice to have a little piece of her there,” he said. “It was also kind of funny because no one knew what she looked like, and so you could get away with putting that picture of her up there. It felt like a secret nod we had as a group.”

You can watch Rauch’s impression of Susi — and hear Susi’s dulcet tones yourself — on “The Big Bang Theory,” which is streaming on HBO Max.