Gilda Radner

Gilda Susan Radner was an American actress and comedian, born in Detroit, Michigan, on June 28, 1946, to Jewish parents Henrietta Radner, a legal secretary, and Herman Radner, a businessman. She grew up in Detroit, spent winters in Miami Beach, Florida, and was part of a family life filled with performance, humor, and loss. Her father operated Detroit’s Seville Hotel, where nightclub performers and actors stayed while working in the city, and he took her to New York to see Broadway shows. When Radner was 12, he developed a brain tumor and died two years later, an event that stayed close to her work and memory.

Radner later traced her comic sense to the people around her. She described her father as “real funny” and said he loved to sing and tap dance. Her mother, she wrote, had an infectious response to humor, so making her laugh became a way to reach her. Radner also credited the family nanny, Elizabeth Clementine Gillies, known to her as “Dibby,” with helping her learn to laugh at herself before other children could. Dibby later helped inspire one of Radner’s best-known characters, Emily Litella.

After attending University Liggett School in Grosse Pointe Woods, Radner enrolled at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor in 1964. She worked on weather reports at the university radio station WCBN, sometimes treating them comically, and took part in theater productions on and off campus. In 1969, she left the university and moved to Toronto. There she took classes to complete her degree, worked in children’s theater, performed pantomime in elementary schools, and made her professional acting debut in the 1972 production of Godspell, alongside future performers including Eugene Levy, Andrea Martin, Victor Garber, Martin Short, and Paul Shaffer.

In 1973, Radner joined The Second City comedy troupe in Toronto, appearing in productions with performers such as Dan Aykroyd, John Candy, Joe Flaherty, and Catherine O’Hara. She also appeared in The National Lampoon Radio Hour and the off-Broadway production of The National Lampoon Show. Her widest fame came in 1975, when she became one of the seven original cast members of NBC’s Saturday Night Live. She was the first performer cast in the show and became part of its original “Not Ready for Prime Time Players.”

On Saturday Night Live, Radner created and performed characters that became closely associated with the show’s early years. On “Weekend Update,” she played Emily Litella, an elderly, hard-of-hearing commentator, and Roseanne Roseannadanna, an advice specialist who rarely gave advice and often drifted into strange, off-topic stories. Radner won an Emmy Award for her work on the show in 1978. She brought those characters and others to her one-woman show, Gilda, Live on Broadway, in 1979, and to its film version in 1980.

After leaving Saturday Night Live in 1980, Radner worked in film, theater, and television. She appeared in the Broadway play Lunch Hour with Sam Waterston and in several films, including three with Gene Wilder, whom she first worked with in Hanky Panky in 1982 and later married. In 1986, after nearly a year of misdiagnoses, she was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. She died from the disease on May 20, 1989. Shortly before her death, she published her autobiography, It’s Always Something, a title drawn from a saying of her father’s and from Roseanne Roseannadanna. Its frank account of work, illness, and personal struggle helps explain why Radner’s words still feel direct, human, and close to the bone.