Do you hear Carol Kane before you see her? The voice that can go pipsqueak high or deep rasp, wavering at just the right moment? Or do you imagine first the mass of golden curls, which telegraph unruliness while actually framing exactly what she wants you to experience?

She modulates that distinctive quaver to match the character, too — “whether it should be lower, or denser, or higher, or an accent,” she said. “I work a lot on that. I get it as specific as I can.”

It’s nearly absent in her “Annie Hall” graduate student, and filtered through quiet Yiddish in “Hester Street,” the 1975 immigrant drama that earned her an Oscar nomination at 22. It swings from the pinched cadences of Simka, with her invented language on the sitcom “Taxi,” to the brash Lillian, the batty, mouthy New York landlord on “Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt.”

And in her newest film, the Sundance favorite “Between the Temples,” in which Kane stars opposite Jason Schwartzman, she runs the gamut from vulnerable to sharp — a vocal confidence scale that’s not far from how her own real-life lilt changes.

More than an eccentric character study, Kane, 72, who has been acting professionally for nearly 60 years, is actually a deceptively versatile performer who, through friendship and dedication to craft, is connected to Hollywood’s golden age — but also appeared at a sci-fi convention this month.

That she became known for comedy “was a surprise to me,” she said. This despite a four-decade sweep that includes that Emmy-winning performance in “Taxi,” holding her own opposite Andy Kaufman, and scene-stealing moments as a witchy wife in “The Princess Bride” and a fairy abusing Bill Murray in “Scrooged.”

Did she think of herself as funny? Not really. She started in theater and her first film role — at 17 — was in the Mike Nichols drama “Carnal Knowledge.” But she knew enough to heed the call when people such as Gene Wilder, James L. Brooks or Tina Fey beckoned.

“A lot of people are funny-adjacent. And Carol’s really funny,” Fey, a creator of the Netflix series “Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt,” said. “She is very much in control of her timing.” On some level, Fey said, Kane is “a machine inside” who takes a precise approach. “But she’s a proper actor, too,” Fey added. “And so you can get vulnerability and real feeling from her very easily.”

IN “BETWEEN THE TEMPLES,” directed by indie filmmaker Nathan Silver, she plays Carla, a retired elementary school music teacher who runs into a former student, Ben (Schwartzman), now a cantor, albeit a depressed one who can’t sing. They strike up a friendship (or maybe more) while Carla studies for a deeply belated bat mitzvah. The movie — funny, idiosyncratic, sad, neurotic and, yes, Jewish — hangs on their dynamic as widowers seeking something outside themselves. Many critics have called Kane’s performance among the best of her career.

Silver, who wrote the movie with C. Mason Wells, said he created it for Schwartzman. But it was not until Kane joined that it came into focus. When Schwartzman and Kane met on a video call for a chemistry test, “within a minute, they were comfortable with each other, doing a screwball comedy kind of back-and-forth,” Silver said, “and I knew we had a movie.”

Schwartzman, 44, said he grew up watching — being fascinated by — Kane, and even pictured her “Princess Bride” scene while they were shooting a pivotal moment in “Between the Temples.”

The story was personal in some ways for Kane, who is also Jewish (but wasn’t bat mitzvahed). It reminded her of her mother, Joy, a composer and music educator who, at 97, still plays the piano daily and who at 55 uprooted her life to move to Paris to study and teach. Kane said she drew on that as inspiration for “someone that, later in life, wanted to learn and become a fuller person.” Today, mother and daughter live together on the Upper West Side, so Kane can care for her mother.

She collects lifelong friendships with co-stars easily. “What took you so long? She’s an important actress!” Billy Crystal, her partner in “The Princess Bride,” said when I called to talk about her. They met years before their 1987 movie, at a party in Jamie Lee Curtis’ West Hollywood apartment. Curtis, Kane and Bette Davis all lived in the same building, and Kane befriended Davis, too.

In “The Princess Bride,” Rob Reiner’s classic fairy-tale comedy, Crystal and Kane are Max and Valerie, a decrepit, bickering couple of potion-sellers, and Kane has one of cinema’s great entrances, screaming “Liaaaarrr!” at her husband as she runs in, white hair flowing. She is on screen for about 90 seconds. And she is indelible.

KANE FELL IN LOVE with performing instantly when she was around 7 and her mother took her to see children’s theater in her native Cleveland. Her family moved around a lot, with stints in Paris and Haiti, following the career of her father, Michael, who was an architect. When her parents divorced, her mother settled in New York, where Kane attended the Professional Children’s School.

Kane was a late addition to the small cast of “Carnal Knowledge,” Nichols’ 1971 marital drama. Arriving on set, she met the filmmaker and immediately went to see the dailies. Watching beside screenwriter Jules Feiffer and stars Jack Nicholson and Art Garfunkel — she played his teenage girlfriend — “I’m just like what? Just paralyzed with shock, you know?” she said. Nichols put her at ease.

“The best direction he gave to me was that he let me know — because I was terrified — that I would be enough, that I couldn’t do anything wrong because I was perfect for the part,” she said.

“That was such a generous way to welcome someone into the world that he was creating.”

THE LOW-BUDGET FILMMAKING of “Between the Temples” was her speed in some ways, but a challenge in others: It had no real screenplay. Silver prefers “scriptments,” more like a novella, which the filmmakers worked on with Schwartzman and Kane for months before shooting.

For Kane, the movie reflects what she has learned about her vocation and the pleasures she still finds in acting. “I’ve learned, as I grow older, that I have to let a lot go. You have no control about what’s going to happen.” She’s in it for the moment, not the endpoint. “So, I’m enjoying it more.”