Gilda Radner

Gilda Radner
File:GildaRadner.jpg
Born	Gilda Susan Radner
Years active	1973 - 1986

Gilda Susan Radner (June 28, 1946 – May 20, 1989) was an American comedienne and actress, best known for her five years as part of the original cast of the NBC comedy series Saturday Night Live. Radner, who died at 42 of ovarian cancer, became an icon for public awareness of both detection and treatment of the disease.

Biography

Early life

She was born to well-to-do Jewish-American parents, Herman Radner and Henrietta Dworkin, in Detroit, Michigan. Her mother named her Gilda after the title character played by Rita Hayworth in Gilda. She grew up in Detroit with a nanny, Elizabeth Clementine Gillies, whom she affectionately called "Dibby" (and on whom she based her famous character Emily Litella) and an older brother named Michael. When Gilda and Michael were very young, they spent their winters in Palm Beach, Florida. She was very close to her father, who operated the Seville Hotel in Detroit where many nightclub performers and actors stayed while they performed in the city, including Frank Sinatra. He sometimes took Gilda on trips to New York so they could see Broadway shows. Details of what they saw and discussed are difficult to determine because it was painful for her to discuss him after he died of brain cancer when she was 14 years old. This may have been a factor in her history of bulimia and anorexia which reportedly began at around the same time as her father's death.

Radner was enrolled at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, where she made a lifelong platonic friend in her fellow student, David Saltman. He said after her death that two pivotal events occurred during her years there: an illegal abortion, from which she never recovered emotionally, and a trip she made with her mother and older brother to a bank where they planned to "bust a trust" as Gilda told him. All family members had become beneficiaries of a trust fund set up by Gilda's father during his fatal illness several years earlier. The fund was an important part of their lives until Gilda joined Saturday Night Live. A year after the abortion, she agreed to join Saltman and his girlfriend on a trip to Paris, which turned out to be an unhappy experience for her. They traveled there in the summer of 1966. Saltman wrote in his 1992 Radner biography that he was so affectionate with his girlfriend that they left Gilda to fend for herself during much of their sightseeing. He later regretted his behavior, especially after his relationship with the girl broke up. After Saltman and millions of others learned more about eating disorders many years later, he realized that Gilda had been in a quandary over the French food, but she had nobody with whom she could discuss the situation.

In Ann Arbor, Gilda Radner began her broadcasting career as the weather girl for college radio station WCBN, but dropped out in her senior year to follow her then-boyfriend, a Canadian sculptor named Jeff Rubinoff, to Toronto, Canada. (He had had nothing to do with her earlier abortion.) In Toronto she made her professional acting debut in the 1972 production of Godspell with future stars Eugene Levy, Andrea Martin, Victor Garber, and Martin Short, and afterward joined the Toronto Second City comedy troupe.

1970s

Radner was a featured player on the National Lampoon Radio Hour, a comedy program syndicated to some 600 U.S. radio stations from 1973 to 1975. Fellow cast members included John Belushi, Richard Belzer, Chevy Chase, Bill Murray and Brian Doyle-Murray.

She first rose to widespread fame as one of the original "Not Ready For Prime Time Players" on Saturday Night Live. Radner was the first actor cast for the show. Between 1975 and 1980, she created such characters as Roseanne Roseannadanna, an obnoxious woman with wild black hair who would tell stories about celebrities' gross habits on the show's "Weekend Update" news segment, inspired in name and appearance by Rose Ann Scamardella, a news anchor at WABC-TV in New York City. Radner's first appearance as this character was in a sketch called "Hire the Incompetent" about a temp agency that hires semi- and inexperienced workers for other companies. Radner's SNL characters also included "Baba Wawa", a spoof of journalist Barbara Walters, exaggerating the latter's apparent difficulty at enunciating the letter "R"; and Emily Litella, an elderly woman who gave angry and misinformed editorial replies on "Weekend Update" on topics such as "sax and violins on television", the "Eagle Rights Amendment", "presidential erections" and "protecting endangered feces". Once corrected on her misunderstanding, Litella would end her segment with a polite "Never mind" - or later on, she would answer Jane Curtin's frustration with a simple "Bitch!" She also famously parodied such celebrities as Lucille Ball, Patti Smith, and Olga Korbut during SNL sketches.

Radner also won an Emmy Award in 1978 for her work on the program.

Radner battled bulimia during her time on the show; she once told a reporter that she had thrown up in every toilet in Rockefeller Center. Another scandal surrounding Radner was that she had had a relationship with co-star Bill Murray, which ended badly. In 1979, incoming NBC President Fred Silverman offered Radner her own prime time variety show, which she ultimately turned down. That year, she was one of the hosts of the Music for UNICEF Concert at the United Nations General Assembly. When the Democratic Convention was in progress at Madison Square Garden in August of 1980, Gilda Radner and Harry Chapin appeared at a fundraiser on the 102nd floor of the Empire State Building for the reelection campaign of politician Paul Simon (politician), then a Democratic member of the U.S. House of Representatives.

Despite Gilda's emotional problems and the generous trust fund that had sustained her before she joined Saturday Night Live, she could be very generous with her friends and co-workers. She helped Laraine Newman find a place to stay after Laraine, a lifelong Angeleno who never set foot in New York before Lorne Michaels hired her, was robbed of everything she owned on her first night in the Big Apple. After their show became successful, Laraine was still overwhelmed by the decision of where to live in Manhattan, so Gilda moved and sublet her old apartment to her castmate. When Gilda noticed that Laraine started withdrawing from other cast and crew members in 1979 and 1980, often playing solitaire, Gilda arranged for a deck of cards to be custom-made with Laraine's picture adorning the backs of the cards.

Gilda also helped her old University of Michigan friend David Saltman start a career as a writer/producer on local television newscasts in New York and on Good Morning America. He penned a biography of her that went on sale three years after she died.

Alan Zweibel, who co - created the Roseanne Roseannadanna character with Gilda and co - wrote all of Roseanne's dialogue, has recalled that Gilda, one of three original SNL cast members who stayed away from cocaine, chastised him for using it. Zweibel and a large majority of his fellow SNL writers used it.

A best-selling book on Saturday Night Live by Doug Hill and Jeff Weingrad, which Gilda lived to read in 1986, describes her relations with fans and strangers who recognized her in public. She sometimes got angry when she was approached, said Hill and Weingrad, and upset when she wasn't.

1980s and marriage to Gene Wilder

In her final season of Saturday Night Live, Radner appeared on Broadway in a successful one-woman show that featured racier material, such as the song "Let's Talk Dirty to the Animals". This show was captured on film in 1981 as Gilda Live! and co-starred Paul Shaffer and Don Novello. The play was also released as an album recording -- the play was a qualified success, the film and album were failures. During the production, she met her first husband, G. E. Smith, a musician who also worked on the show whom she married in a civil ceremony in 1980.

Radner met her second husband, Gene Wilder, on the set of the Sidney Poitier film Hanky Panky between 1981 and 1982. She described their first meeting as "love at first sight." She soon divorced Smith in 1982 and went on to make a second movie, The Woman in Red, in 1984 with Wilder. The two were married on September 18, 1984 in the south of France and made a third movie together, Haunted Honeymoon, in 1986.

Illness and death

After being severely fatigued and suffering from pain in her upper legs on the set of Haunted Honeymoon, Radner was diagnosed with ovarian cancer in October 1986. Even with Wilder's support, she suffered extreme physical and emotional pain as a chemotherapy and radiotherapy patient. Eventually, she was told she had gone into remission, and she wrote a memoir about her life and struggle with the illness, called It's Always Something (a catchphrase of her character Roseanne Roseannadanna).

In 1988, Gilda Radner guest-starred as herself on It's Garry Shandling's Show on Showtime cable television to great critical acclaim. When Shandling asked her why she had not been seen for awhile, she replied "Oh, I had cancer. What did you have?" Shandling's reply: "A very bad series of career moves." When Shandling said he had been under the impression that she was dead, she cited Mark Twain's famous quote "Reports of my death are greatly exaggerated." She planned to host an episode of SNL that year but a writers' strike caused the cancellation of the rest of the season. She wanted to host the next year, but in May 1988 doctors found that her cancer had recurred and had spread to other areas of her body. She had not seen or communicated with any of her former SNL castmates since Laraine Newman's 35th birthday party in Los Angeles in 1987, and she never saw any of them again.

Gilda Radner was admitted to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, California on May 17, 1989 for a CAT scan. After fearing she would never wake up, she was given a sedative and passed into a coma. She never regained consciousness and she died three days later at 6:20am on May 20, 1989, with her husband at her side.

Gene Wilder had this to say about her death:

She went in for the scan – but the people there could not keep her on the gurney. She was raving like a crazed woman – she knew they would give her morphine and was afraid she’d never regain consciousness. She kept getting off the cart as they were wheeling her out. Finally three people were holding her gently and saying, "Come on Gilda. We’re just going to go down and come back up." She kept saying, "Get me out, get me out!" She’d look at me and beg me, "Help me out of here. I’ve got to get out of here." And I’d tell her, "You’re okay honey. I know. I know." They sedated her, and when she came back, she remained unconscious for three days. I stayed at her side late into the night, sometimes sleeping over. Finally a doctor told me to go home and get some sleep. At 4 am on Saturday, I heard a pounding on my door. It was an old friend, a surgeon, who told me, "Come on. It’s time to go." When I got there, a night nurse, whom I still want to thank, had washed Gilda and taken out all the tubes. She put a pretty yellow barrette in her hair. She looked like an angel. So peaceful. She was still alive, and as she lay there, I kissed her. But then her breathing became irregular, and there were long gaps and little gasps. Two hours after I arrived, Gilda was gone. While she was conscious, I never said goodbye.

Her funeral was held in Connecticut on May 24, 1989. In lieu of flowers, her family requested that donations be sent to The Wellness Community. By a coincidence, the news of her death had broken in the early afternoon of the Saturday that Steve Martin was rehearsing his hosting duties for that night's season finale of Saturday Night Live. Lorne Michaels and the writers, including Mike Myers and Phil Hartman, had not known she was so close to death. They scrapped one of their planned skits and had Martin introduce a video clip of a 1978 skit in which he and Gilda made fun of an old Hollywood romantic couple's dance. He cried during his introduction.

Legacy

Wilder has since established the Gilda Radner Ovarian Detection Center at Cedars-Sinai to screen high-risk candidates (such as women of Ashkenazi Jewish descent) and run basic diagnostic tests. He testified before a Congressional committee that her condition was misdiagnosed and that if doctors had inquired more deeply into her family background they would have found that her grandmother, aunt and cousin all died of ovarian cancer and might have attacked the disease earlier. Through these efforts and the efforts of others, ovarian cancer awareness has spread, and there is more widespread awareness of the symptoms of ovarian cancer.

Wilder continued his involvement in both detection and treatment of ovarian cancer. In tribute to Radner, Gilda's Club, a comfortable center where cancer patients and their families can go to be around other people in the same situation to share support, coping and wellness strategies, was founded in 1994. (The center was named for a famous quip from Radner, in which she said "Having cancer gave me membership in an elite club I'd rather not belong to.") Many Gilda's Clubs have opened nationwide and in Canada and continue to do so.

In 2002 the ABC television network aired a TV-movie about her life, Gilda Radner: It's Always Something, starring Jami Gertz as Radner.

Awards and honors

Won an Emmy for "Outstanding Continuing or Single Performance by a Supporting Actress in Variety or Music" for her performance on Saturday Night Live in 1977.

She posthumously won a Grammy for "Best Spoken Word Or Non-Musical Recording" in 1990.

In 1992, Radner was inducted into the Michigan Women's Hall of Fame for her achievements in arts and entertainment.

Received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame on June 272003 at 6801 Hollywood Blvd.

Television work

• Jack: A Flash Fantasy (1974)
• The Gift of Winter (1974) (voice)
• Dr. Zonk and the Zunkins (1974-1975) (voice)
• Saturday Night Live (cast member from 1975-1980)
• The Rutles: All You Need Is Cash (1978)
• Witch's Night Out (1978) (voice)
• Bob & Ray, Jane, Laraine & Gilda (1979)
• Animalympics (1980) (voice)

Filmography

• The Last Detail (1973)
• Mr. Mike's Mondo Video (1979)
• Gilda Live (1980)
• First Family (1980)
• Hanky Panky (1982)
• It Came from Hollywood (1982) (documentary)
• The Woman in Red (1984)
• Movers & Shakers (1985)
• Haunted Honeymoon (1986)

External links

• Gilda Radner at IMDb
• Gilda's Club
• Gilda Radner Cancer Detection Program
• Find A Death - Gilda Radner
• Jewish Women in Comedy - Gilda Radner
• Gilda Radner page at Godspell.ca
• Maxim Rated Top SNL performer