The Career Arc: Gilda Radner
“The goal is to live a full, productive life even with all that ambiguity. No matter what happens, whether the cancer never flares up again or whether you die, the important thing is that the days that you have had you will have lived.” ~ Gilda Radner
Roseanne Roseannadanna, Mrs. Wilder, Emily Litella, or simply Gilda Radner is one of the most important human beings in comedy. She may not be as much of a household name anymore, as she left this earth 28 years ago, but she is responsible for so many that live on today. Does Saturday Night Live sound familiar? Being one of the seven original cast members of this iconic late night comedy show will forever etch her name in show business. She literally set the stage for superstar men and women in comedy and laid on her deathbed finding humor in the situation. From getting laughed at for her performance in her all girls high school to performing in her one-woman broadway show to making a home video of her chemotherapy, Gilda Radner found the funny side of things in life and that is something that everyone could use more of.
As 99% of celebrities go, growing up was hard for Gilda Radner. She was not the cool popular kid, no. Gilda was Born in Detroit, Michigan and lived with her parents and her brother Michael. Her mother was not a fan of the cold Detroit winters, so they spent years going back forth between winters spent in Florida and the rest of the year residing in Detroit. This made for a complicated school year for Gilda and her brother, never being able to make long-term friends. Food became Gilda’s one constant throughout the year, and her chubbiness became a platform for bullying in her younger years. In her book It’s Always Something Radner confesses that she “had developed every eating disorder known to mankind by the age of 9.” She continued to struggle with bulimia through her years on Saturday Night Live.
In her younger years, her parents hired a nanny, known as Dibby, who taught Gilda how to find the humor in her issues and how to deal with the bullying. Dibby can also be referred to as Miss Emily Litella, the SNL character that Gilda created in her honor. However, after years of switching between schools in Michigan and Florida, Gilda begged her parents to let her go to an all girls private school.
Stage 1: How It All Started
Liggett private school for women, is where Gilda Radner first found her desire to perform and make people laugh. However, she had little success with any of her works that she found herself a part of at this school. In her high school years, she directed a serious show to which many viewers laughed at her from the audience. Luckily this didn’t discourage her from continuing to try. Her education moved on to the University of Michigan where she spent 6 years on and off being enrolled and never finishing an undergraduate degree.
Eventually, in 1969 she dropped out to follow her boyfriend to Toronto, where she believed she could be the perfect housewife that lived on a farm and wore a printed dress everyday. A year and four months later, the depression that had creeped up on her became too much to bear. Her creativity and desire to perform had been shoved in a corner and she realized that that life was not in fact the perfect dream she hoped it would be. The two split, but she did not part ways with Canada. She auditioned for a musical and found herself on set for Godspell. This show dealt with the journey of Jesus though a humorous lens.
Her next, and probably more important, venture was the Second City improvisational group that she joined in Toronto. This gig was a huge step for Gilda and her career. She remains a legacy to the living cast of Second City today. She explains in It’s Always Something that it was the most stressful job imaginable. It was a constant frantic buzz of what the next performance would be and she described it as “completely taxing her imagination,” and prepared her incredibly well for her years to come. This experience forced her to dig deep and helped her so much with her writing. While working there she also met John Belushi and Bill Murray, who became great friends and continued working with each other.
Stage 2: A Star Is Born
“I grew up in front of a television, I guess I’ll grow old inside one” ~ Gilda Radner
After a few years with Second City Improvisational group, Gilda Radner moved to New York City along with Bill Murray and John Belushi. They all got involved The National Lampoon Radio Hour. The radio show was broadcasted among 600 radio stations, but the cash was just not rolling in so eventually to business folded. Many members from the radio show and the improvisational group from Toronto joined together and got casted for a new gig. Now what you have all been waiting for… It’s Saturday Night Live!!! Lorne Michaels started the new late night comedy show and Gilda Radner was the first member to be casted. The 7 original cast members were known as the Not Ready For Primetime Players and included: Gilda Radner, Bill Murray, John Belushi, Chevy Chase, Garrett Morris, Dan Aykroyd, and Laraine Newman.
In her book, she has a blurb about this point in time when she was in New York, just an average comedian trying to make her way, and she stumbled into a funky clothing store in search of outfits for the sketches on the show. The man working the register told her that he had seen the show and that all of the cosmic forces in the universe had been lined up: her and the other cast members were destined to be stars. Boy was he right! The first season of Saturday Night Live was a huge hit. Gilda single-handedly created many hilarious characters that would appear on the “Weekend Update” sketches and many more involving the other cast members.
The fame grew each season after the takeoff of SNL. Gilda Radner measures the journey by the modes of transportation. She says that on Saturday nights, after the show was over she would be walking back to her apartment alone on 6th Avenue. There was a disconnect. In a matter of 20 minutes, she was performing on national television and then walking by herself in the cold with no one around. For the next season of SNL, a cab service was hired to take the members of the show from the set to the after party. The third year, each member of the show had their individual cab that they could call to get them from their apartments, take them to the shows and the afterparties, and then home again. By the fourth season, all of the cast members could parade around like royalty in their very own limousine. Gilda remembers waving to Bill Murray in his limousine while she was sitting in her limousine, and thinking how she thought it was ridiculous because she would rather be with everyone else in the same car.
Gilda Radner was a driving force for the five seasons that she was on the show for. The many characters that she created are still talked about as a comedic legacy today. Roseanne Roseannadanna was one of the most popular characters created. The measly woman with huge hair and two red clips is the health correspondent that goes off on tangents that don’t help anyone get in better shape, except maybe tone your stomach from laughing. On the 40th anniversary of SNL, Emma Stone performed as the iconic character from the 70s.
However, Roseannadanna was not the character that was based off of her childhood nanny. No, that would be Emily Litella, the softer and more likable old woman that gave editorial replies. At the end of giving her opinion the weekend update host would inform her that she had misunderstood what the editorial was supposed to be about and had gone off on a tangent about something irrelevant and end with the famous line “nevermind.”
By the fourth year of Saturday Night Live, Gilda had enough characters on the show to make a live broadway performance. Lorne Michaels, who started the show, directed and produced the broadway show: Gilda Live in 1980. It was a one woman show, Gilda Radner of course, that was open for 7 weeks in New York City in addition to one week in Chicago and Boston. Warner Brothers filmed her performances and made a movie out of it. In a matter of a few years, Gilda Radner transformed from a struggling comedian to a superstar. She was on posters everywhere and magazines were referring to her as “America’s Sweetheart.” While on the broadway train, she fell in love with and married G. E. Smith, the guitar player on the Gilda Live band and later the lead singer for Saturday Night Live.
Stage 3: Business and Married Life
Following her broadway experience, Gilda got casted in a movie Hanky Panky. It is a movie about a woman trying to find her brother’s murderer and ends up in a wild cross-country chase from New York City to the Grand Canyon. She costarred with Gene Wilder, who she believes it was love-at-first-sight with. Her marriage deteriorated with G. E. Smith and she fell deeply in love with Wilder. She split with the guitarist and started her life with Wilder. Her new career was making movies with her new husband.
She explained in It’s Always Something that over the next 5 years she slept with the guy in charge of casting, the producer, and the director in order to get the parts in the movies. All of these people, of course, being Gene Wilder. These movies included The Woman in Red in 1984 and later in 1986 Haunted Honeymoon. These movies were fairly successful, but definitely not the highlight of Radner’s career. They were more of a side job to keep her in the public eye, but really she just wanted to spend all of her time with her husband who she was so madly in love with.
Sometime after filming The Woman In Red the two really wanted to have a baby. At age 38 the doctors told her that she was infertile because her tubes were clogged. She attributed some of her sexual organ health to be due to the illegal abortion that she had when she was 19 years old. Another 19 years later, getting pregnant was her main goal. In her book, she goes into extreme detail of doctors visits, procedures, and off-color methods to try and get pregnant, but still nothing. This really took a toll on her happiness, and the couple gave up on having a child for a while to began shooting Haunted Honeymoon. Then, somehow, someway she became pregnant while on set. She figured it might not be the best time, but why not go for it because they had wanted it so bad earlier. To the couple’s misfortune, Gilda’s miscarriage took away all hopes for birthing a child.
Stage 4: What’s Funny About Dying?
“Cancer is probably the most unfunny thing in the world, but I’m a comedian, and even cancer couldn’t stop me from seeing the humor in what I went through.”
To add to the legendary comedic icon that she was, Gilda also made a huge impact on the population dealing with cancer. The miscarriage was followed with lots of pains and other health problems. Her condition had been misdiagnosed multiple times, but in the end it was ovarian cancer that took her.
Even in her darkest days she still wanted to find humor in her situation. That was what she was good at. That was what she had done her whole life. Before her ninth, and last, chemotherapy treatment, she decided that she was going to make a comedic documentary of her treatment. She had dedicated husband film them walking into the doctor’s office, conversations with doctors, procedures and what not. Even her sleeping from the daze of the drugs was filmed. They edited it with lots of jump backs and she found it hilarious. It was never released to the public, but she got a great laugh from it and described it in great detail in It’s Always Something.
“For weeks after Gilda died, I was shouting at the walls. I kept thinking to myself, ‘This doesn’t make sense.’ The fact is, Gilda didn’t have to die. But I was ignorant, Gilda was ignorant — the doctors were ignorant.” — Gene Wilder
Her husband made it his mission to raise awareness about ovarian cancer, because he believed that if there had been more research with the illness, that his beloved wife would not have passed away at such a young age. Since her death, many research centers and support groups have opened in her name. Life hit her hard with eating disorders which started at only a few years old, and even harder in her last years with ovarian cancer. The funny side of things is what made her alive and what drives people to get through even the toughest of times.