Gilda Radner

At 42 years old, Gilda Radner has this physical status:

Gilda Susan Radner (June 28, 1946 – May 20, 1989) was an American comedian and actress who was one of the seven original cast members for the NBC sketch comedy show Saturday Night Live (SNL).

In her routines, Radner specialized in parodies of television stereotypes, such as advice specialists and news anchors, and in 1977, she won an Emmy Award for her performances on the show.

She also portrayed those characters in her highly successful one-woman show on Broadway in 1979. Radner's SNL work established her as an iconic figure in the history of American comedy.

She died from ovarian cancer in 1989.

Her autobiography dealt frankly with her life, work, and personal struggles, including those with the illness.

Her widower, Gene Wilder, carried out her personal wish that information about her illness would help other cancer victims, founding and inspiring organizations that emphasize early diagnosis, hereditary factors and support for cancer victims.

She was posthumously awarded a Grammy Award in 1990.

Radner was inducted into the Michigan Women's Hall of Fame in 1992; and she posthumously received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2003.

Early life

Radner was born in Detroit, Michigan, to Jewish parents, Henrietta (née Dworkin), a legal secretary, and Herman Radner, a businessman. Through her mother, Radner was a second cousin of business executive Steve Ballmer. She grew up in Detroit with a nanny, Elizabeth Clementine Gillies, whom she called "Dibby" (and on whom she based her famous character Emily Litella), and an older brother, Michael. She attended the exclusive University Liggett School in Detroit. Toward the end of her life, Radner wrote in her autobiography, It's Always Something, that during her childhood and young adulthood she had battled numerous eating disorders: "I coped with stress by having every possible eating disorder from the time I was nine years old. I have weighed as much as 160 pounds and as little as 93. When I was a kid, I overate constantly. My weight distressed my mother and she took me to a doctor who put me on Dexedrine diet pills when I was ten years old."

Radner was close to her father, who operated Detroit's Seville Hotel, where many nightclub performers and actors stayed while performing in the city. He took her on trips to New York to see Broadway shows. As Radner wrote in It's Always Something, when she was 12, her father developed a brain tumor. The first symptoms came on suddenly: he told people that his glasses were too tight. Within days, he was bedridden and unable to communicate, and remained in that condition until his death two years later.

In 1964, Radner graduated from Liggett and enrolled at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, where she planned to get a degree in education.

Personal life

After breaking up with Jeffrey Rubinoff, Radner had an on-again-off-again relationship with Martin Short while both were appearing in Godspell. Radner had romantic involvements with several male Saturday Night Live castmates, including Bill Murray (after a previous relationship with his brother Brian Doyle-Murray) and Dan Aykroyd. Radner's friend Judy Levy recounted Radner saying she found Ghostbusters hard to watch since the cast included so many of her ex-boyfriends: Aykroyd, Murray, and Harold Ramis. Radner was married to musician G. E. Smith from 1980 to 1982; they met while working on Gilda Radner – Live from New York.

Radner met actor Gene Wilder on the set of the Sidney Poitier film Hanky Panky (released in 1982), when the two worked together making the film. She described their first meeting as "love at first sight". After meeting Wilder, her marriage to Smith deteriorated. Radner made a second film with Wilder, The Woman in Red (released in 1984), and their relationship deepened. The two were married on September 18, 1984, in Saint-Tropez. They made a third film together, Haunted Honeymoon, in 1986 and remained married until her death in 1989.

Details of Radner's eating disorder were reported in a book about Saturday Night Live by Doug Hill and Jeff Weingrad, which was published and received much media coverage during a period when Radner was consulting various doctors in Los Angeles about symptoms of an illness she was suffering that turned out to be cancer.

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Career

Radner dropped out to Toronto with her boyfriend, Canadian sculptor Jeffrey Rubinoff. Eugene Levy, Andrea Martin, Victor Garber, Martin Short, and Paul Shaffer made their professional debut in Godspell, a 1972 film. Radner appeared in The Second City comedy troupe in Toronto later this year.

Radner appeared on National Lampoon Radio Hour, a comedy series syndicated to over 600 radio stations in the United States, from 1974 to 1975. John Belushi, Chevy Chase, Richard Belzer, Richard Belzer, Bill Murray, Brian Doyle-Murray, and Rhonda Coullet were among the cast members.

Radner first came to fame in 1975 as one of the original "Not Ready for Prime Time Players," the freshman cast of Saturday Night Live's first season. She was the first actress to be cast in the series, co-wrote much of the script, and collaborated with Alan Zweibel (of the show's writing staff) on the creation of sketches that included her recurring characters. Roseanne Roseannadanna, the obnoxious personal advice specialist (modeled after Rose Ann Scamardella), and Barbara Walters' parody "Baba Wawa" were both created between 1975 and 1980. Walters said in an interview that Radner had been the "first person to mock news anchors" and that now it's done all the time."

Emily Litella, an elderly, hearing-impaired journalist who made irate remarks in interview sketches on SNL's recurring Weekend Update segment, was another one of Radner's invented characters. In SNL sketches, the narrator also parodied celebrities, including Lucille Ball, Patti Smith, and Olga Korbut. She received an Emmy Award in 1978 for her work on SNL. Radner was ranked ninth in importance in Rolling Stone's review of all 141 SNL cast members to date in February 2015. "Radner was] the most beloved of the original cast," they wrote. "Elaine Radner, Mary Tyler Moore's Elaine's Elaine, was the prototype for the brainy city girl with a slew of neuroses."

On the program, Radner battled bulimia. Bill Murray, a fellow SNL and National Lampoon castmate, had a relationship with her that ended badly, but no details about their friendship or their separation were given public. Murray was only once in her autobiography, and in passing: "All the guys [in the National Lampoon group of writers and performers] liked to have me around because I would laugh at them until I peed in my pants and tears rolled out of my eyes." We worked together on The National Lampoon Exhibition, written The National Lampoon Radio Hour, and even doing advertisements for the magazine. "Bill Murray appeared on the show and Richard Belzer joined the show, and Richard Belzer..."

Alan Zweibel, co-created the Roseanne Roseannadanna story and co-wrote Roseanne's dialogue, remembered that Radner, one of only three original SNL cast members who did not use cocaine, chastised him for insulting it.

Fred Silverman, the NBC's current president and CEO, welcomed Radner to her own primetime variety show in 1979, but she turned down the bid. She appeared at the United Nations General Assembly's Music for UNICEF Concert the same year. To the 1979 graduating class at the Columbia School of Journalism, Radner delivered the commencement address in person as Roseanne Roseannadanna.

According to reports, Radner expressed mixed feelings about being recognized and approached in public by followers and other strangers. Doug Hill and Jeff Weingrad, a SNL historian, said she became "angry when she was approached and angry when she wasn't" and "angry when she wasn't."

In 1979, Radner appeared on Broadway in a hit one-woman show, Gilda Radner – Live from New York. On Saturday Night Live, the show featured material that was more offensive than NBC censorship, such as the song "Let's Talk Dirty to the Animals." It was the same year, shortly before Radner's last season on Saturday Night Live, that her Broadway show was shot by Mike Nichols and broadcast with the name Gilda Live. In 1980, it co-starred Paul Shaffer and Don Novello and appeared in theaters around the country, but was not a box-office flop. A soundtrack album was also marginally disappointing. Radner's first husband, G. E. Smith, a composer who appeared on the show, met her on stage. In 1980, they were married in a civil ceremony.

Radner appeared in the Jean Kerr play Lunch Hour in 1980, following the departure of all of the original SNL cast members from the program. They played two people whose spouses are having an affair and who, in revenge, begin a new affair involving lunch-hour trysts. The show lasted more than seven months in various theatres throughout the United States, including the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C. Both the play and Radner's success were lauded by newspaper commentators, including Tom Shales.

Quoting her interview,

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