Selma Diamond

Actress and comedy writer Selma Diamond may best be remembered as the feisty, whiskey-voiced bailiff Selma Hacker in the first year of the popular television sitcom Night Court, but she was involved in the entertainment industry many years before that. A native of Canada, Diamond graduated from a New York university and got her start selling ideas for cartoons and humorous stories to various magazines. She also became a comedy writer for such radio and television personalities as Milton Berle, Tallulah Bankhead, Sid Caesar and Groucho Marx. Diamond also appeared in a few films, especially during the early '80s. She died in 1985, after working for only a year on Night Court.