Lily Tomlin

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Lily Tomlin bigraphy, stories - American comedian and actor

Lily Tomlin : biography

September 1, 1939 –

Mary Jean "Lily" Tomlin (born September 1, 1939) is an American actress, comedian, writer, and producer. Tomlin has been a major force in American comedy since the late 1960s when she began a career as a stand up comedian and became a featured performer on television’s Laugh-in. Her career has spanned television, comedy recordings, Broadway, and motion pictures, enjoying acclaimed success in each medium. She has starred in such films as Nashville, Nine to Five, All of Me, The Beverly Hillbillies, Orange County, and I Heart Huckabees. Her notable television roles include Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In as a cast member from 1970–73, Ms. Frizzle on The Magic School Bus, Kay Carter-Shepley on Murphy Brown, and Deborah Fiderer on The West Wing. She currently stars as Lillie Mae on the ABC sitcom Malibu Country.

Motion pictures

Tomlin made her dramatic debut in Robert Altman’s Nashville, for which she was nominated for 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 (played by Keith Carradine). 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, however, 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 soon had the greatest hit of her film career with 1980’s Nine to Five in which she played a secretary named Violet Newstead who joins coworkers Jane Fonda and Dolly Parton in seeking revenge on their monstrous boss, Franklin M. Hart, Jr., played by Dabney Coleman. The film was a huge success and one of the year’s top grossing films. Tomlin then starred in the 1981 science fiction comedy The Incredible Shrinking Woman, a send-up of consumerism, and was the sickly heiress in the comedy All of Me opposite Steve Martin.

Tomlin and Bette Midler played two pairs of identical twins who were switched at birth in the 1989 comedy Big Business. Tomlin also played chain-smoking waitress Doreen Piggott in Altman’s 1993 ensemble film Short Cuts, and, in two films by director David O. Russell; she appeared as a peacenik Raku artist in Flirting with Disaster and later, as an existential detective in I ♥ Huckabees. In 2007, a video recording surfaced showing Tomlin and Russell in a heated exchange over the shooting of a scene in Huckabees.

Tomlin collaborated again with director Robert Altman in what would prove to be his last film, A Prairie Home Companion, released in 2006, playing Rhonda Johnson, one half of a middle-aged Midwestern singing duo with Meryl Streep.

Early life

Tomlin was born in Detroit, Michigan, the daughter of Lillie Mae (née Ford), a housewife and nurse’s aide, and Guy Tomlin, a factory worker. Tomlin’s parents were Southern Baptists who moved to Detroit from Paducah, Kentucky, during the Great Depression.

She is a 1957 graduate of Cass Technical High School. Tomlin attended Wayne State University, where her interest in the theater and performing arts began. After college, Tomlin began doing stand-up comedy in nightclubs in Detroit and later in New York City. Her first television appearance was on The Merv Griffin Show in 1965. 

Recordings

Tomlin released her first comedy album on Polydor Records in 1971, This Is A Recording, an album of Ernestine’s run-ins with customers over the phone. The album hit #15 on the Billboard Hot 200, becoming (and remaining as of 2011) the highest-charting album ever by a solo comedienne.. Billboard.com. She would earn a Grammy award that year for Best Comedy Recording.

Tomlin’s second album, 1972’s And That’s The Truth, a collection of monologues as Edith Ann, was nearly as successful, peaking at #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.)