Lily Tomlin

Happy Birthday to Lily Tomlin! With an illustrious career that spans decades on stage and screen beginning in the 1960s, academic-minded actress-comedian Lily Tomlin found a penchant for mimicry and social commentary that wove its way into the fabric of American culture. After making her debut on The Garry Moore Show (1950-1967), Tomlin made a splash on Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In (1968-1973), particularly as the nasal-voiced telephone operator Ernestine. She went on to become a Grammy-winning recording artist for her comedy album, This Is a Recording (1972), while also starring in and co-writing three primetime television specials, each of which won Emmy Awards. Tomlin made her feature film debut as a troubled gospel singer in Robert Altman's landmark Nashville (1975) for which she was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress, before appearing on Broadway for the first time in her one-woman show, Appearing Nitely (1977), which she co-wrote with life partner Jane Wagner. A comedy-mystery, The Late Show, teaming Tomlin with Art Carney, was a critical success in 1977, it won her the Silver Bear for Best Actress and nominations for the Golden Globe and BAFTA Award for Best Actress. One of the few widely panned projects of Tomlin's career was 1978's Moment by Moment, directed and written by Wagner, which teamed Tomlin in a cross-generational older woman/younger man romance with John Travolta, The ludicrously bad film has become a cult hit in recent years. In 1980, Tomlin co-starred in 9 to 5, in which she played a secretary named Violet Newstead who joins coworkers Jane Fonda and Dolly Parton in seeking revenge on their boss, Franklin M. Hart, Jr., played by Dabney Coleman. The film was one of the year's top-grossing films. Tomlin then starred in the 1981 science fiction comedy, The Incredible Shrinking Woman, playing three roles, The film, a send-up of consumerism, was written by Wagner, wasn't a box office hit at the time, but has since also achieved a cult following. Tomlin bounced back with the critical and financial hit All of Me (1984), opposite Steve Martin, in which she played a sickly heiress whose spirit became trapped in Martin's body. Tomlin and Bette Midler played two pairs of identical twins who were switched at birth in the 1988 comedy, Big Business. In 1991 she released The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe, a filmed version of her beloved 1985 Broadway show. For her efforts on the film, Tomlin received a Funniest Actress in a Motion Picture American Comedy Awards, amongst other notable accolades. She had a small part in Woody Allen's Shadows and Fog (1992) and played Miss Jane Hathaway in a big screen remake of The Beverly Hillbillies (1993). Tomlin also played chain-smoking waitress Doreen Piggott in Robert Altman's 1993 ensemble film Short Cuts, based on stories by Raymond Carver. Tomlin performed in two films by director David O. Russell; she appeared as a peacenik Raku artist in Flirting with Disaster (1996) and later, as an existential detective in I  Huckabees (2004). In March 2007, two videos were leaked onto YouTube portraying on-set arguments between Russell and Tomlin, in which among other things he called her sexist names. When the Miami New Times asked Tomlin about the videos, she responded, "I love David. There was a lot of pressure in making the movie—even the way it came out you could see it was a very free-associative, crazy movie, and David was under a tremendous amount of pressure. And he's a very free-form kind of guy anyway." Her other film roles include Getting Away with Murder (1996) with Jack Lemmon, Krippendorf's Tribe (1998) with Richard Dreyfuss, Cher's best-friend and American compatriot Georgie Rockwell in Tea with Mussolini (1999), The Kid (2000) with Bruce Willis and Orange County (2000) with Chevy Chase. Tomlin collaborated again with director Robert Altman in what would prove to be his last film, A Prairie Home Companion (2006). She played Rhonda Johnson, one-half of a middle-aged Midwestern singing duo partnered with Meryl Streep. She was also in Paul Shrader's The Walker (2007) with Woody Harrelson and Lauren Bacall, reunited with Steve Martin in The Pink Panther 2 (2009) and played Tina Fey's mother in Admission (2013). In 2015, Tomlin starred in filmmaker Paul Weitz's film, Grandma, which Weitz said was inspired by Tomlin, garnered rave reviews, and earned Tomlin a Golden Globe Award nomination. She voiced Aunt May Parker in Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018). Tomlin was the first woman to appear solo in a Broadway show with her premiere of Appearing Nitely at the Biltmore theatre in March 1977. The same month, she made the cover of Time with the headline "America's New Queen of Comedy". Her solo show then toured the country and was made into a record album titled On Stage. In 1985, Tomlin starred 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 won her a Tony Award. Tomlin revived the show for a run-on Broadway in 2000 which then toured the country through mid-2002. In 1989, she won the Sarah Siddons Award for her work in Chicago theatre. Tomlin premiered her one-woman show Not Playing with a Full Deck at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas in November 2009. It was her first appearance in that city, though she did tape an Emmy-winning TV special, a spoof of Las Vegas called Lily: Sold Out which premiered on CBS in January 1981.

In 1972, Tomlin released This Is A Recording, her first comedy album on Polydor Records in 1972 that contained Ernestine's run-ins with customers over the phone. The album hit No. 15 on the Billboard Hot 200, becoming (and remaining as of 2011) the highest-charting album ever by a solo comedienne. She earned a Grammy award that year for Best Comedy Recording. Tomlin's second album, 1972's And That's The Truth, featuring her character Edith Ann, was nearly as successful, peaked at No. 41 on the chart and earning another Grammy nomination. (Tomlin has two of the three top charting female comedy albums on Billboard, sandwiching a 1983 Joan Rivers release.) Tomlin's third comedy album, 1975's Modern Scream, a parody of movie magazines and celebrity interviews featured her performing as multiple characters, including Ernestine, Edith Ann, Judith, and Suzie. Her 1977 release Lily Tomlin On Stage, was an adaptation of her Broadway show that year. Each of these albums earned Tomlin additional Grammy nominations. Tomlin recorded a single/EP called "The Last Duet" with Barry Manilow. She won her first Emmy Award in 1974 for writing and producing her own television special, Lily. She also won Emmys for writing The Lily Tomlin Special, The Paul Simon Special and Lily: Sold Out. She hosted Saturday Night Live in 1977 and was a guest on Richard Pryor's short lived series Pryor's Place (1984). She was in the groundbreaking HBO miniseries And the Band Played On (1992). Tomlin voiced Ms. Valerie Frizzle on the animated television series The Magic School Bus from 1994 to 1997. Also, in the 1990s, Tomlin appeared on the sitcom Murphy Brown as the title character's boss. In 1995 she appeared on an episode of Homicide: Life on the Street as a murder suspect being transported to Baltimore. She also guest starred on The X-Files in 1998, in episode 6 ("How The Ghosts Stole Christmas") of season 6 as a ghost haunting an old mansion. In 2005 and 2006, she had a recurring role as Will Truman's boss Margot on Will & Grace. She appeared in the series The West Wing for four years (2002–2006) in the recurring role of presidential secretary Deborah Fiderer. In the 2008–2009 fifth season of Desperate Housewives, she has a recurring role as Roberta, the sister of Mrs. McCluskey (played by Kathryn Joosten who coincidentally had played Tomlin's secretarial predecessor on The West Wing). Tomlin and Kathryn Joosten were in talks to star in a Desperate Housewives spin-off, which was given the green light in May 2009. The series plan was scrapped due to Joosten's illness, a recurrence of lung cancer; Joosten died on June 2, 2012, twenty days after the onscreen death from cancer of her character Karen McCluskey. During the 2008 Emmy Awards, Tomlin appeared as part of a tribute to the influential 1960s television series Laugh-In. Tomlin voiced Tammy in the 2005 The Simpsons episode "The Last of the Red Hat Mamas". In 2010, Tomlin guest starred as Marilyn Tobin in the third season of Damages opposite Glenn Close, for which she was nominated for an Emmy. She also appeared in the NCIS episode titled "The Penelope Papers", playing Penelope Langston, the grandmother of Agent Timothy McGee (Sean Murray). In 2012, Tomlin guest starred on the HBO series Eastbound and Down as Tammy Powers, mother of the main character Kenny Powers, and appeared in three episodes of Season 3. Tomlin co-starred with Reba McEntire in the ABC TV series Malibu Country (2012- 2013) as Reba's character's mother Lillie Mae. The show lasted one season. Tomlin starred opposite Jane Fonda, Martin Sheen, and Sam Waterston in the Netflix original series Grace and Frankie. Tomlin plays Frankie Bergstein, recently separated from her husband of forty years (Waterston) while Fonda plays Grace Hanson, recently separated from her husband (Sheen). Grace and Frankie become reluctant friends after learning their husbands are leaving them to be with one another. It has earned her nominations for four Primetime Emmy Awards, three Screen Actors Guild Awards, and a Golden Globe Award. The Show ended in 2022. Tomlin reprised her role as now Professor Frizzle in the 2017 Netflix sequel The Magic School Bus Rides Again, a continuation of the original series. She reteamed with Jane Fonda in two recent films Moving On and 80 for Brady, which also co=starred Sally Field, Rita Moreno and Tom Brady. 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 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. In 2014, she was given Kennedy Center Honors and in 2017 she received the Screen Actors Guild Life Achievement Award.