Lily Tomlin

At 85 years old, Lily Tomlin has this physical status:

Mary Jean "Lily" Tomlin (born September 1, 1939) is an American actress, comedian, writer, singer and producer.

Tomlin started her career as a stand-up comedian as well as performing Off-Broadway during the 1960s.

Her breakout role was on the variety show Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In from 1969 until 1973.

She currently stars as Frankie Bergstein on the Netflix series Grace and Frankie, which debuted in 2015 and has earned her nominations for four Primetime Emmy Awards, three Screen Actors Guild Awards and a Golden Globe Award.In 1974, Tomlin was cast by Robert Altman in her first film; her performance as Linnea Reese in Nashville won her several awards and nominations for the Golden Globe and Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress.In 1977, her performance as Margo Sperling in The Late Show won her the Best Actress Award at the Berlin International Film Festival and nominations for the Golden Globe and BAFTA Award for Best Lead Actress.

Her other notable films include 9 to 5 (1980), All of Me (1984), Big Business (1988), Flirting with Disaster (1996), Tea with Mussolini (1999), I Heart Huckabees (2004), and Grandma (2015). Her signature role was written by her then partner (now wife), Jane Wagner, in a show titled The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe which opened on Broadway in 1985 and won Tomlin the Tony Award for Best Lead Actress in a Play.

She is also known as the voice of Ms.

Frizzle on the children's series The Magic School Bus.

She won her first Emmy Awards in 1974 for writing and producing her own television special, Lily.

Tomlin won a Grammy Award for her 1972 comedy album This Is a Recording.

In 2014, she was given Kennedy Center Honors and in 2017 she received the Screen Actors Guild Life Achievement Award.

Early life

Tomlin was born in Detroit, Michigan, the daughter of Lillie Mae (née Ford; January 14, 1914 – July 12, 2005), a housewife and nurse's aide, and Guy Tomlin (March 3, 1913 – October 24, 1970), a factory worker. She has a younger brother named Richard Tomlin. Tomlin's parents were Southern Baptists who moved to Detroit from Paducah, Kentucky, during the Great Depression. Although she attended a Southern Baptist church as a child, she later grew to become irreligious. She is a 1957 graduate of Cass Technical High School. Tomlin attended Wayne State University and originally studied biology. She auditioned for a play, and it sparked her interest in a career in the theatre and she changed her major. After college, Tomlin began doing stand-up comedy in nightclubs in Detroit and later in New York City. She continued studying acting at the HB Studio. Her first television appearance was on The Merv Griffin Show in 1965. A year later, she became a cast member on the short-lived third and final incarnation of The Garry Moore Show.

Personal life

Lily Tomlin owns two homes in Los Angeles, California.

Tomlin met her future wife, writer Jane Wagner, in March 1971. After watching the after-school TV special J.T. written by Wagner, Tomlin invited Wagner to Los Angeles to collaborate on Tomlin's comedy LP album And That’s The Truth. The couple did not have a formal coming out. Tomlin said in 2006:

Tomlin stated in 2008, "Everybody in the industry was certainly aware of my sexuality and of Jane ... in interviews, I always reference Jane and talk about Jane, but they don't always write about it." In 2015, Tomlin said, "I wasn’t totally forthcoming. Everybody in the business knew I was gay, and certainly everybody I worked with and everything like that." Tomlin has been generally quiet about her sexuality.

On December 31, 2013, Tomlin and Wagner married in a private ceremony in Los Angeles after 42 years together.

Tomlin has been involved in a number of feminist and gay-friendly film productions, and on her 1975 album Modern Scream she pokes fun at straight actors who make a point of distancing themselves from their gay and lesbian characters—answering the pseudo-interview question, she replies: "How did it feel to play a heterosexual? I've seen these women all my life, I know how they walk, I know how they talk ..."

In 2013, Tomlin and Wagner worked together on the film An Apology to Elephants, which Wagner wrote and Tomlin narrated.

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Career

Tomlin appeared on NBC's sketch comedy show Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In in 1969, after a stint as a hostess on ABC's Music Scene. Signed as a replacement for the departed Judy Carne, Tomlin's debut on the newly established program in which, in addition to being in general sketches and delivering comedic gags, she began to appear as the regular characters she created; they became well known and she portrayed them outside of the show in later recordings and television specials.

Tomlin was one of the first female comedians to break out in male drag with her characters Tommy Velour and Rick. Pervis Hawkins, a black rhythm-and-blues soul singer patterned after Luther Vandross, premiered in 1982, but was later popularized on Saturday Night Live in a three-piece suit, with a mustache, beard, and close-cropped afro hairstyle. Tomlin used little, if any, skin-darkening cosmetics as part of the character, rather than relying on stage lighting to produce the effect.

In 1970, AT&T offered to Tomlin $500,000 to play Ernestine in a commercial, but she turned down, claiming that it would damage her artistic integrity. In 1976, Ernestine was on Saturday Night Live as Ernestine, "We don't care, we don't have to, we don't have to... we're the phone company." The character appeared at The Superhighway Summit in UCLA on January 11, 1994, interrupting a talk given by then-Vice President Al Gore on the information superhighway. In a 1998 ad campaign for Fidelity Investments that did not include Ernestine or Edith Ann, she appeared as three of her minor characters. She appeared in two WebEx commercials as an "updated" Ernestine.

With three animated prime-time television specials, Tomlin brought Edith Ann to the forefront once more in the 1990s. My Life (1995), edited with Jane Wagner, Edith Ann's "autobiography" My Life (1995).

Tomlin's first comedy collection on Polydor Records in 1972, which featured Ernestine's run-ins with customers over the phone in 1972. The album debuted at No. 77. The Billboard Hot 200 has risen to (and remained unchanged as of 2011) the top-charting album ever by a solo comedienne. That year, she was named Best Comedy Recording in a Grammy Award.

And That's The Truth, Tomlin's second album, 1972's And That's The Truth, starring her character Edith Ann, was nearly as popular, peaking at No. 2nd, just over a million. On the chart, 41 is the most popular and earning another Grammy nomination. (Tomlin has two of the top-charging female comedy albums on Billboard, sandwiching a 1983 Joan Rivers release.)

Ernestine, Edith Ann, Judith, and Suzie appeared on Tomlin's third comedy album, 1975's Modern Scream, a parody of movie magazines and celebrity interviews. Lily Tomlin On Stage, a 1977 revival, was an extension of her Broadway show that year. Tomlin received additional Grammy nominations for each of these albums.

With Barry Manilow, Tomlin performed "The Last Duet," a single/EP.

Tomlin's debut in Nashville, Texas, where she was nominated for the Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actress and an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress; she played Linnea Reese, a straitlaced, gospel-sing mother of two deaf children who has an affair with a womanizing country singer (played by Keith Carradine). Lee Grant received the award this year for her work in Shampoo. In 1977, The Late Show, a comedy-mystery starring Tomlin and Art Carney, was a huge success. Moment by Moment, 1974, directed and written by Wagner, was one of Tomlin's few highly coveted projects in his career.

Tomlin appeared in 9 to 5, in which she played Violet Newstead, coworkers Jane Fonda and Dolly Parton in their revenge on their boss, Franklin M. Hart, Jr., played by Dabney Coleman. The film was one of the year's best-grossing films. Tomlin appeared in three roles (a fourth, a re-imagining of her Edith Ann character was cut from the theatrical print, but a video of this character was included in several later television shows.) Wagner wrote the film, a consumerist's send-up, and it received mixed feedback. Tomlin recovered from the devastating and financial strife opposite Steve Martin in a scene where she played sickly heiress whose spirit became trapped in Martin's body.

Both Tomlin and Bette Midler performed two sets of identical twins who were switched at birth in the 1988 comedy, Big Business. In Altman's 1993 ensemble film Short Cuts, based on Raymond Carver's novella, Tomlin played chain-smoking waitress Doreen Piggott. Tomlin appeared in two films directed by David O. Russell, first as a peacenik Raku artist in Flirling with Disaster and later as an existential detective in I Heart Huckabees. Russell and Tomlin's on-set arguments were leaked onto YouTube in March 2007, among other things, she used her sexist names. When Tomlin was asked about the videos by the Miami New Times, she replied, "I love David." A lot of pressure went into making the film—even though it came out it was a very free-associative, bizarre film, and David was under a lot of pressure. And he's a very free-form type of guy, right?"

In what would be his last film, A Prairie Home Companion (2006), Tomlin worked with director Robert Altman again. She partnered with Meryl Streep as Rhonda Johnson, one-half of a middle-aged Midwestern singing pair. Tomlin appeared in the film Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea, which was released in August 2009.

Tomlin appeared in filmmaker Paul Weitz's film Grandma, which Weitz said was inspired by Tomlin. It received rave reviews and earned Tomlin a Golden Globe Award nomination.

Tomlin made her Broadway debut in Appearing Nitely, a solo show written and co-directed by Jane Wagner at the Biltmore Theatre in March 1977. This year, she was given a Special Tony Award for her work. She appeared on Time magazine in the month "America's New Queen of Comedy." Her solo show then toured the country and was turned into a record album titled On Stage. In 1985, Tomlin appeared in another one-woman Broadway show The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe, written by her long-time life partner, writer/producer Jane Wagner. The show received a Tony Award and was turned into a feature film in 1991. In 2000, Tomlin revived the show for a run on Broadway, which later toured the country until mid-2002. She received the Sarah Siddons Award in 1989 for her work in Chicago's theatre. In November 2009, Tomlin premiered her one-woman performance Not Playing With a Full Deck at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas. It was her first appearance in the city, but she did tape an Emmy-winning television special called Lily: Sold Out, a spoof of Las Vegas that premiered on CBS in 1981.

Ms. Valerie Frizzle, the animated television series The Magic School Bus from 1994 to 1997, was Tomlin's voiced Ms. Valerie Frizzle. Tomlin debuted on the popular sitcom Murphy Brown in the 1990s as the title character's boss. She appeared on "Homicide" as a murder suspect and was transported to Baltimore in 1995. In episode 6 ("How The Ghosts Stole Christmas") of season 6, she appeared as a ghost haunting an old mansion. She appeared on Will & Grace in 2005 and 2006. She appeared on the enthralling role of presidential secretary Deborah Fiderer on television for four years (2002-2006).

Roberta, the sister of Mrs. McCluskey, was portrayed by Kathryn Joosten in Desperate Housewives' fifth season (1908–2009). Tomlin appeared on the 2008 Emmy Awards as part of the famous 1960s television show Laugh-In. In the 2005 The Simpsons episode "The Last of the Red Hat Mamas," Tomlin voiced Tammy. Tomlin has been a contributor to wowowow.com, a website for women that explores culture, politics, and gossip since its inception in 2008.

In May 2009, Tomlin and Kathryn Joosten were in talks to appear in a Desperate Housewives spin-off that was originally accepted. Joosten's illness, a recurrence of lung cancer, a recurrence of lung cancer, recurrence of lung cancer, had to be scrapped from the series; Joosten died on June 2, 2012, 20 days after her character Karen McCluskey died from cancer. Marilyn Tobin appeared in the third season of Damages opposite Glenn Close in 2010, where she was nominated for an Emmy. Penelope Langston, the grandmother of Agent Timothy McGee (Sean Murray), appeared in the NCIS episode "The Penelope Papers," as Penelope Langston. Tomlin guest appeared on HBO's Eastbound and Down as Tammy Powers, the mother of the main character Kenny Powers, in three episodes of Season 3.

In the television series Malibu Country as Reba's character's mother Lillie Mae, Tomlin co-starred with Reba McEntire. The series debuted in August 2012 on a first date of November 2, 2012, at 8:30 p.m. ET, but it was cancelled in 2013 after 18 episodes.

In the Netflix original series Grace and Frankie, Tomlin appeared alongside Jane Fonda, Martin Sheen, and Sam Waterston. Tomlin plays Frankie Bergstein, who was recently divorced from her husband of 40 years (Waterston), while Fonda portrays Grace Hanson, who was recently divorced from her husband (Sheen). Since finding their husbands are leaving them to be with one another, Grace and Frankie became dissatisfied. In 2015, she was nominated for the first Emmy Award for the role.

In the Netflix sequel The Magic School Bus Rides Again, a spin on the original film, Tomlin reprised her role as Professor Frizzle.

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