Lily Tomlin
Mary Jean "Lily" Tomlin is an American actress, comedian, writer, singer, and producer. Tomlin started her career in stand-up comedy and sketch comedy before transitioning her career to acting across stage and screen. In a career spanning more than fifty years, Tomlin has received numerous accolades, including seven Emmy Awards, a Grammy Award, two Tony Awards, and a nomination for an Academy Award. She was also awarded the Kennedy Center Honor in 2014 and the Screen Actors Guild Life Achievement Award in 2017.
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. Her signature role, which was written by her then-partner Jane Wagner, was in the show The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe, which opened on Broadway in 1985 and earned Tomlin the Tony Award for Best Actress in a Play. She won Emmy Awards for the special Lily and received a Grammy Award for Best Comedy Album for This Is a Recording, the very first solo female to do so.
In 1975, Tomlin made her film debut with Robert Altman's Nashville, which earned her a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. In 1977, her performance as Margo Sperling in The Late Show won her the Silver Bear for Best Actress and nominations for the Golden Globe and BAFTA Award for Best Actress. Her other notable films include All of Me, Big Business, Flirting with Disaster, Tea with Mussolini, I Heart Huckabees, A Prairie Home Companion, Grandma and the voice of Aunt May in Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse.
Tomlin is known for her collaborations with Jane Fonda starring in the films 9 to 5, 80 for Brady, and Moving On. She also starred with Fonda on the Netflix series Grace and Frankie, which ran for seven seasons from 2015 to 2022 and for which she received four Emmy nominations for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Comedy Series. From 2002 to 2006, she portrayed Deborah Fiderer on the Aaron Sorkin series The West Wing. She also voiced Ms. Frizzle for the children's animated series The Magic School Bus and The Magic School Bus Rides Again.
Early life and education
Tomlin was born in Detroit, Michigan, the daughter of Lillie Mae, a housewife and nurse aide, and Guy Tomlin, 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.Career
1965–1974: Career beginnings and breakthrough
Tomlin's 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.Tomlin characters
In 1969, after a stint as a hostess on the ABC series Music Scene, Tomlin joined NBC's sketch comedy show Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In. Signed as a replacement for the departing Judy Carne, Tomlin was an instant success on the already established program, in which in addition to appearing in general sketches and delivering comic gags, she began appearing as the regular characters she created; they became well known and she portrayed them outside of the show in later recordings and television specials:
- Ernestine was a brash, tough and uncompromising telephone operator who generally treated customers with little sympathy. Ernestine often snorted when she let loose a barbed response or heard something salacious; she also wore her hair in a 1940s hairstyle with a hairnet, although the character was contemporary. Her opening lines were often the comical "one ringy dingy... two ringy dingy", and, "Have I reached the party to whom I am speaking?" In the sketches, Ernestine was usually at her switchboard taking calls. She occasionally phoned her boyfriend, Vito, a telephone repair man, or her pal Phenicia, another operator. Tomlin reprised the role in 2016 for a TV ad as part of PETA's campaign against SeaWorld. Tomlin has also reprised the role on several episodes of Sesame Street.
- Edith Ann is a precocious five-and-a-half-year-old girl who waxes philosophical on everyday life, either about life as a kid or things for which she feels she has the answers, although she is too young to fully understand. She often ends her monologues with "And that's the truth", punctuating it with a noisy raspberry. Edith Ann sits in an oversized rocking chair with her rag doll, Doris, and often talks of life at home with her battling parents and bullying older sister, Mary Jean. Edith Ann has an oversized, playfully aggressive dog named Buster and a boyfriend named Junior Phillips, a possibly unrequited love. Tomlin reprised the character for a series of sketches on Sesame Street in the 1970s, and voiced her in three prime-time cartoon specials in the 1990s.
- Mrs. Judith Beasley is a housewife and mother from Calumet City, Illinois, who is often chosen for television commercials and offers "good consumer advice". She appears in the film The Incredible Shrinking Woman as the lead character's neighbor.
- Mrs. Earbore is a somewhat prudish and prissy, conservatively dressed middle-aged apolitical woman who dispenses advice on gracious living and a life of elegance.
- Susie the Sorority Girl is a blonde collegiate who could be the Tasteful Lady's daughter. Humorless and melodramatic, her biggest worries are the likes of who took her missing album by The Carpenters.
- The Consumer Advocate Lady is a dour, austere woman who rigidly inspects and tests products for their alleged value. The Consumer Advocate Lady is something of a variation of Mrs. Beasley.
- Lucille the Rubber Freak is a woman addicted to eating rubber, whose monologue details her habit from its beginning to her obsessive rock bottom. Tomlin performed this character as part of her Laugh-In audition.
- Tess/Trudy is a homeless bag lady who accosts theater-goers and various passers-by with her offbeat observations and tales of communications with extraterrestrials.
- Bobbi-Jeanine is a showbiz veteran of the lounge circuit where she sings and plays organ. She often dispenses advice.
In 1970, AT&T offered Tomlin $500,000 to play her character Ernestine in a commercial, but she declined, saying it would compromise her artistic integrity. In 1976, she appeared on Saturday Night Live as Ernestine in a Ma Bell advertisement parody in which she proclaimed, "We don't care, we don't have to...we're the phone company." The character later made a guest appearance at The Superhighway Summit at UCLA on January 11, 1994, interrupting a speech being given on the information superhighway by then-Vice President Al Gore. She appeared as three of her minor characters in a 1998 ad campaign for Fidelity Investments that did not include Ernestine or Edith Ann. In 2003, she made two commercials as an "updated" Ernestine for WebEx. Tomlin brought Edith Ann to the forefront again in the 1990s with three animated prime-time television specials. She published Edith Ann's "autobiography", My Life, co-written with Jane Wagner.
Tomlin released her first comedy album, This Is A Recording, on Polydor Records in March 1971 that contained Ernestine's run-ins with customers over the phone. The album hit No. 15 on the Billboard Hot 200, becoming 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, peaking at No. 41 on the chart and earning another Grammy nomination.
1975–1989: Film stardom and acclaim
Tomlin made her dramatic debut in Robert Altman's Nashville, for which she was nominated for a Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actress and an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress; she played Linnea Reese, a straitlaced, gospel-singing mother of two deaf children who has an affair with a womanizing country singer. The Oscar that year went to Lee Grant for her role in Shampoo. A comedy-mystery, The Late Show, teaming Tomlin with Art Carney, was a critical success in 1977. 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. 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 in 1980.In March 1977, Tomlin made her Broadway debut in the solo show Appearing Nitely, which she co-wrote and co-directed with Jane Wagner, at the Biltmore Theatre. She received a Special Tony Award for this production. 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 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 and met with mixed reviews.
File:Dolly Parton Lily Tomlin Jane Fonda.jpg|thumb|right|Dolly Parton, Tomlin, and Jane Fonda starred in 9 to 5
Tomlin bounced back with the critical and financial hit All of Me, opposite Steve Martin, in which she played a sickly heiress whose spirit became trapped in Martin's body. 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 and was made into a feature film in 1991. 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. Tomlin and Bette Midler played two pairs of identical twins who were switched at birth in the 1988 comedy Big Business.