A Christmas Story

 When they filmed the scene in the Chinese restaurant in "A Christmas Story" (1983), Melinda Dillon was purposely given the wrong script, and everyone was in on it. She had no idea that the duck would still have its head and the first time she saw it was when they were filming. Her reactions during the entire sequence were not scripted, which is what director Bob Clark was going for.

Clark once recalled being in a restaurant in New Hampshire when he overheard a family at a nearby table speaking what sounded like dialogue from "A Christmas Story." Turned out, it was. The maître d’ explained that it was a ritual every Christmas Eve for this family to come to the restaurant, sit around a table, and recite dialogue from every scene. “That’s when it began to sink in,” said Clark. “This low-budget fluke of a movie” had become a quintessential Christmas tradition.

“Ralphie’s mother is the kind of woman I figure grew up in a family of four or five sisters and married young,” Jean Shepherd, writer of the book "In God We Trust: All Others Pay Cash," which the film is partly based on, said. “She digs the Old Man, but also knows he’s as dangerous as a snake.”

Dillon was cast on the basis of her role as the mom in Steven Spielberg’s blockbuster "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" (1977). She had begun her career as a coat-check girl at Second City, the improv-comedy theater in Chicago, where she would soon begin performing. At 23, she played the mousy wife, Honey, in the original Broadway production of Edward Albee’s searing drama "Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" and was nominated for a Tony. She was also nominated twice for an Academy Award—first for Spielberg’s "Close Encounters of the Third Kind," and again for "Absence of Malice" (1981), opposite Paul Newman.

Dillon would later play another mother to a tender-age son who received a BB gun in "Harry and the Hendersons" (1987).