Mrs Munchnick, Empress Nympho, El Sleezo Patron, Mrs Montenegro, Estie Del Ruth, Lili Von Shtupp, Trixie Delight, Gorgeous Teitelbaum... There are few actresses who have gloried in as many colourful characters as has Madeline Kahn, the wonderful comedienne, who died on December 3rd, aged 57.
For better or worse, she is most associated in film-goers' minds with Mel Brooks' broad spoofs: Blazing Saddles, Young Frankenstein and High Anxiety.
However, whereas Brooks never knows how far not to go, Madeline Kahn always revealed a real, vulnerable women beneath the campy vamps. She realised that you don't have to play a broad broadly. She could be hilarious and pathetic at the same time.
Her Oscar-nominated, sexy saloon singer Lili Von Shtupp in Blazing Saddles (1974) was one of her most memorable roles.
Bestriding a chair and singing I'm Tired - a send-up of Marlene Dietrich's The Laziest Gal In Town - Lili drives the local cowboys wild. When one of them presents her with a flower, she exclaims, in a German accent, "Oh, one wed wose, how wovely!"
In Young Frankenstein (1974), she played the doctor's fiancee, who marries the monster after he exposes himself to her. In the school-of-Brooks comedy, The Adventure Of Sherlock Holmes' Smarter Brother (1975), directed and starring Gene Wilder, she was a red-haired mystery woman, described by critic Pauline Kael as looking "sweetly upholstered, in her Gay Nineties costumes, and, with that ladylike control of hers that goes a little awry, she's a perfect comic cupcake."
She was born in Boston, and grew up there and in New York, the child of divorced middle-class parents. She graduated in speech therapy from Hofstra University on Long Island, where she performed in the college stage productions.
One of her teachers warned her that her baby-talk way of speaking, which has been described as though "filtered through a ceramic nose", would be a handicap.
But she turned this to her advantage, using her voice to comic effect right to the last - providing the voice for Gypsy the moth in the recent animation hit, A Bug's Life.
In 1965, after appearing in the chorus of the revival of Kiss Me Kate on Broadway she became a regular in revues at New York's Upstairs at the Downstairs club and on the Tonight Show on television.
It was Peter Bogdanovich who gave her first two film roles. She was truly funny as professor Ryan O'Neal's put-upon priggish fiancee in What's Up Doc? (1972) and irrepressible as the floozy, Trixie Delight, who hitches herself to conman O'Neal and his daughter (Tatum O'Neal) in Paper Moon which gained her the first of her two Best Supporting Actress Oscar nominations.
She was also the only member of the cast who could dance and hold a tune in Bogdanovich's offkey musical At Long Last Love (1975).
But even Madeline Kahn could not rescue the number of appalling films in which she then appeared.
Happily, her talents were not wasted on stage.
In David Rabe's The Boom Boom Room (1973), she was a touching go-go girl, and was splendid as the film star Lily Garland aka Mildrid Plotka in the Broadway musical On the 20th Century (1978). Both won her nominations for a Tony award.
Another nomination came her way for her role as Billy Dawn in the 1989 revival of Garson Kanin's Born Yesterday.
Looking incredibly like Judy Holliday, who created the part, she brilliantly revealed the cool, common sense beneath the "dumb blonde" exterior.
In 1993, she finally won a Tony for Best Actress in Wendy Wasserstein's The Sisters Rosensweig.
More recently, she appeared in four episodes of Cosby - as the friend and business partner of Cosby's wife.
Not long after taping the last shows, Madeline Kahn, who married last October, announced that she was suffering from ovarian cancer.
Best to remember her as one interviewer described her: "A kind of toy person: diminutive, delightful, sexy, impish, cute and capable of squirting vinegar in your eye."
Madeline Kahn: born 1942; died December, 1999.