If Madge Levinson, the woman in the accompanying photo, looks familiar, there are lots of good reasons.

You may have seen this veteran actress in some of the more than 100 Toledo-area community theater productions in which she’s appeared. Or the 99 TV commercials she’s done, including the one she was in on April 15, for Blue Cross Blue Shield Michigan. And then there are her many radio, print, and corporate ads.

Or maybe you saw her in Clint Eastwood’s 2008 film Gran Torino, where she appeared as a featured extra, walking out of Eastwood’s character’s house after the funeral of his wife; her character’s car won’t start and Eastwood has to help her. Or in Sean Penn’s 2009 movie This Must Be the Place; she had a scene with Penn and sat next to him at dinner. “A very complex person,” she says.

Or possibly you caught her in Sigourney Weaver’s Prayers for Bobby, a 2009 Lifetime TV movie where she had a principal role as Weaver’s mother. Weaver, she says, is a doll.

Her resume also includes the 2009 film Whip It, directed by Drew Barrymore.

“I particularly liked Drew Barrymore, because she — this doesn’t always happen with directors — she knew what she wanted and she knew how to explain it, she knew how to get it from the actors, in the sweetest possible way. She’s a delightful person. I really liked her, very much,” Levinson said.

Madge Levinson has long appeared in Toledo community theater, including the Toledo Repertoire Theatre and North Coast Theater, but didn’t act professionally in films and commercials until after she retired at age 67.

Levinson had been coordinator of volunteers at the Sight Center, where she founded the Sight Center Audio Network, a reading service broadcast on radio for people who can’t read standard print material.

The fourth of five girls born in Beaver Falls, Pa., Levinson met her husband, Alvin Levinson, at the University of Chicago, where she earned a degree in chemistry. The couple had a son, Daniel, who lives in Boston, and a daughter, Janet, in Brooklyn, and moved to Toledo in 1969. They were married for 64 years until his death in 2011. She also has two grandchildren, Richard and Emily.

Her earliest recollection of performing was when she was in the second grade in Beaver Falls, singing and dancing with her friend Dorothy onstage in a show at Geneva College. She acted in plays in high school, but “I was a fat little girl who read well, so I was always the narrator, never the ingénue,” she said with a laugh.

Levinson, whose 92nd birthday was April 14, has a three-page resume of acting credits — and three agents, one local and two in the Detroit area.

The agents call her when they have a part they think she will be right for, and she goes up to the Detroit area to audition. The films she’s appeared in were shot in Michigan, in the days when the state offered tax credits for filmmakers. She and a group of other women often try out for the same roles.

“There are about six old ladies, and every time there’s an audition they call us all, and we all go in; sometimes I get it, and sometimes one of the others gets it. They’re all nice people,” Levinson said.

One of Levinson’s agents, Ann Wilson of Productions Plus in West Bloomfield, Mich., has known her for years, and describes her as a natural who takes direction and brings her best. “She’s very, very professional and organized, just amazing.” The two worked together on a shoot in Pontiac about two weeks ago.

Wilson recalls a shoot for a commercial in Michigan several years ago that was to depict a summer day, but was actually being filmed in winter in the cold and snow. Levinson’s costume was a dress, and she had to appear outdoors.

“We put someone’s fur coat on her to keep her warm,” Wilson said in a phone interview. “And when they were ready to shoot she’d take off the coat and they’d put lights on her to make it look like a sunny day. She never complained, she just did it, and then she got in her car and drove home. She’s amazing, she really is.”

On Toledo stages, Levinson’s most recent roles include appearing as Lady Cravenshire in the Toledo Repertoire Theatre’s January production of Calendar Girls, and playing Vera in 4000 Miles, in a staged reading presented in March by Actors Collaborative Toledo and Toledo School for the Arts students. The production raised funds for a TSA scholarship in memory of Jennifer Rockwood, a renowned member of the local theater community.

One of Levinson’s favorite performances came in the drama ’night Mother, at the Toledo Rep in 1985. “It’s just such a wonderful part, and I had a wonderful co-star, Vickie Jackson,” she said.

She also loved doing Moonglow at the Toledo Rep in 2014. Playwright Kim Carney came down from Michigan for opening night, and participated in a talkback after the performance, Levinson recalls.

“I am not the kind of actress who delves deeply into character,” Levinson said. “I think I would rather delve into the script ... what the author wrote,” adding that she considers herself an intuitive actor.

When it comes to performing, she likes acting onstage best; however, she said with a laugh, you get paid for doing commercials, and she has met some interesting people doing movies.

Stage work “is right in the moment,” she said, and 50 percent of acting is the audience. “When you’re doing something on film, the only audience you have is the crew, and they’re busy doing other things.”

Every audience is different, “You can feel the way they are reacting to you,” she said, and every performance is different too. She relishes the times “you feel at the top of your form and you’re full of energy and you give it your all, and you know you’ve done a good job.”

Among the changes she’s seen in the local theater scene are the growth in the number of productions and the rise of staged readings, a form of theater with minimal sets and costumes, where the actors read from scripts.

Toledo actor and director Paul Causman, who was artistic director of the Toledo Rep from 1986 to 1991, has known Levinson since he moved here in ’86. He describes her as an extraordinarily believable actress.

“She approaches her roles very organically — she works from the inside out,” Causman said. ”She understands her character’s motivations, she understands why her character does things. That way she gives her characterizations enormous depth.”

As an actor, Levinson’s contributions to local theater are incalculable, Causman said, noting her hundreds of performances for children’s shows and for regular seasons, her work on Shakespeare, competitions in high schools. “She’s worked nonstop.”

She is the chairman of the Toledo Rep’s Armchair Theatre, a fund-raising troupe that presents performances, mostly humorous readings, for church and business groups and other organizations, requesting donations to the Rep. Their next show is in May.

She is an avid theatergoer and patron of the opera. “I wanted to be an opera singer, but unfortunately I never had the pipes,” she said.

When will Levinson be onstage again? She’s playing Puck in a free production of Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream at 7 p.m. Wednesday in the Bedford Library, 8575 Jackman Rd.

Contact Sue Brickey at:sbrickey@theblade.com.

First Published April 24, 2016, 4:00 a.m.