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.[10][11][12] 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
Tomlin's first television appearance was on The Merv Griffin Show in 1965.[13] 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
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 as Edith Ann, 1975 Tomlin reprised the role in 2016 for a TV ad as part of PETA's campaign against SeaWorld.[15] 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 (to make Tomlin seem child-sized) with her rag doll, Doris, and often talks of life at home with her battling parents and bullying older sister, Mary Jean (Lily Tomlin's given birth names). Edith Ann has an oversized, playfully aggressive dog named Buster and a boyfriend named Junior Phillips, a possibly unrequited love. (Only Edith Ann and "Doris" appear in the Edith Ann sketches.) 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 (including Edith Ann: A Few Pieces of the Puzzle).
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 (The Tasteful Lady) 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 (chewing the eraser on pencils) to her obsessive rock bottom (eating the tip off mother's cane). 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. ("They don't care if you believe in 'em or not—they're different from God.")
Bobbi-Jeanine is a showbiz veteran of the lounge circuit where she sings and plays organ. She often dispenses advice. ("It's not called Show Art, it's Show Business.)
Tomlin was one of the first female comedians to break out in male drag with her characters Tommy Velour and Rick. In 1982, but later popularized by a Saturday Night Live appearance on January 22, 1983, she premiered Purvis Hawkins, a black rhythm-and-blues soul singer (patterned after Luther Vandross), with a mustache, beard, and close-cropped afro hairstyle, dressed in a three-piece suit. Tomlin used very little, if any, skin-darkening cosmetics as part of the character, instead depending on stage lighting to create the effect.
Tomlin in 1976
In 1970,
WebEx.[19] 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 (1995), co-written with Jane Wagner
.
Tomlin released her first comedy album,
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. (Tomlin has two of the three top-charting female comedy albums on Billboard, sandwiching a 1983 Joan Rivers release.)[20]
Tomlin made her dramatic debut in Robert Altman's Nashville (1975), 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 (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 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.[21]
In March 1977, Tomlin made her
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 (a fourth, a reprise of her Edith Ann character, was cut from the theatrical print, but footage of this character was included in some later TV showings.) The film, a send-up of consumerism
, was written by Wagner and met with mixed reviews.
Dolly Parton, Tomlin, and Jane Fonda starred in 9 to 5 (1980)
Tomlin bounced back with the critical and financial hit
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
.
1990–2009: Continued work and The West Wing
Tomlin in 2008
Tomlin also played chain-smoking waitress Doreen Piggott in Altman's 1993 ensemble film
Deborah Fiderer. Tomlin performed 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 Heart Huckabees. 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."[23]
Tomlin collaborated again with director Robert Altman in what would prove to be his last film,
Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea, which was released in August 2009.[24] In the 2008–2009 fifth season of Desperate Housewives, she had 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). 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
".
Since its launch in 2008, Tomlin has been a contributor for
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 TV series Malibu Country
as Reba's character's mother Lillie Mae. The series started shooting in August 2012 with a premiere date of November 2, 2012, at 8:30 pm ET but was canceled in 2013 after 18 episodes.
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.[33] The couple did not have a formal coming out. Tomlin said in 2006:
I certainly never called a press conference or anything like that. [Back in the 1970s,] people didn't write about it. Even if they knew, they would [refer to Jane as] "Lily's collaborator", things like that. Some journalists are just motivated by their own sense of what they want to say or what they feel comfortable saying or writing about. In '77, I was on the cover of Time. The same week I had a big story in Newsweek. In one of the magazines it says I live alone, and the other magazine said I live with Jane Wagner. Unless you were so really adamantly out, and had made some declaration at some press conference, people back then didn't write about your relationship. In '75 I was making the Modern Scream album and Jane and I were in the studio. My publicist called me and said, "Time will give you the cover if you'll come out." I was more offended than anything that they thought we'd make a deal. But that was '75—it would have been a hard thing to do at that time.[33]
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."[34][35] 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.[36]
On December 31, 2013, Tomlin and Wagner married in a private ceremony in Los Angeles after 42 years together.[37][38]
Beliefs and activism
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 ..."[11] In 2013, Tomlin and Wagner worked together on the film An Apology to Elephants, which Wagner wrote and Tomlin narrated.[39]
Wagner, Jane, Elon Soltes, Wendy Apple, and Lily Tomlin. Appearing Nitely. Valley Village, Calif.: Tomlin and Wagner Theatricalz, 1992. Recorded live at the
Tomlin, Lily, and Jane Wagner. And That's the Truth. United States: Universal Music Enterprises, 2003. Recorded live at The Ice House, Pasadena, March 1976. Audio book.
Tomlin, Lily, and Jane Wagner. The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe. Tarzana, Calif.: Laugh.com, 2005. 1992 HBO television film. A film adaptation of the Broadway play by Jane Wagner.
Wagner, Jane, Marilyn French, and Lily Tomlin. The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe. New York, NY: ItBooks, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers, 2012. Reprint. Originally published: New York: Harper & Row, 1986. Based on the Broadway play written by Wagner starring Lily Tomlin. Includes an Afterword by Marilyn French and Reflections by Lily Tomlin and by Jane Wagner.
^Tomlin in Radosta, Jim (May 30, 2008). "Lily Tomlin Interview". Just Out. Not online. Quote referenced in sources including Kaye, Frank (February 16, 2012). "Lily Tomlin Graces the Stage". Baltimore Gay Life. Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender Community Center of Baltimore and Central Maryland. Retrieved January 7, 2014.
Tribune Content Agency. Retrieved January 7, 2014.[dead link
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