Gilda Radner

30 Rock (2006) star and creator (and ex-Saturday Night Live (1975) writer and player) Tina Fey has named Gilda as the main reason she became a comedy writer.

She was posthumously awarded a Star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6801 Hollywood Boulevard in Hollywood, California on June 27, 2003.

Biography in: "American National Biography." Supplement 1, pp. 499-500. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.

Gene Wilder and Gilda's cancer psychotherapist, Joanna Bull, established Gilda's Club in 1991. This was Gilda's wish that a place could be established where people of all ages diagnosed with cancer could come together and support one another through the illness. The centers are non-medical and very homey, with an art center, exercise facility, game rooms and a children's room called Noogieland, so named for "noogies", one of Gilda's comedic actions. No such place as Gilda's Club existed when she battled her ovarian cancer. Gilda's Club currently has centers all over the United States and Canada.

Won a Posthumous Grammy Award for Best Spoken Word or Non-Musical Recording (1990).

Biography in: "The Scribner Encyclopedia of American Lives." Volume Two, 1986-1990, pages 718-720. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1999.

Gilda left the show in 1980 and married actor Gene Wilder, whom she met on a movie set and fell in love with nearly on the spot. A short while after, Gilda started having pains in her upper legs, and she was eventually diagnosed with ovarian cancer. She went through lots of chemotherapy and treatment, and finally her doctors told her that she was in remission. In this period of time, Gilda wrote her autobiography, called "It's Always Something," about her battles with cancer. However, cancer was found in her liver and her lungs after a more comprehensive check a while later. Now it was too late to do anything.

Was considered for the role of Shirley Feeney on the sitcom Laverne & Shirley (1976) according to Penny Marshall. The role eventually went to Cindy Williams.

Radner grew up with a nanny she always called Dibby, on whom she based her famous Saturday Night Live (1975) character, hard-of-hearing news correspondent Emily Litella. She was very close to her father, not as close to her mother, and tragically, her father died when she was 14, leaving her heartbroken. She was very overweight as a child, and because of this, she suffered from anorexia and bulimia and became very thin.

She overcame these disorders by 16 and was normal weight, yet if you watch some of her episodes of Saturday Night Live (1975) you can see that her weight sometimes goes down very low and she looks anorexic again. She graduated from the Liggett school for Girls and enrolled at the University of Michigan but dropped out and followed a boyfriend to Canada, where she made her stage debut in Godspell.

In 1975, Gilda was the first person ever cast for Saturday Night Live (1975), the show that would make her famous.

She stayed on SNL for 5 years, from 1975 to 1980 and had a brief marriage to the SNL band guitarist G. E. Smith. On this show, she created characters like Emily Litella, loudmouthed Roseanne Roseannadanna, nerd Lisa Loopner, and Baba Wawa, a talk show host with a speech impediment.

Dated Martin Short during the early 1970s, after meeting him during the run of the legendary 1972 Toronto production of "Godspell". In addition to Radner and Short, this production also starred Victor Garber, Eugene Levy, Dave Thomas and Andrea Martin, with Paul Shaffer as musical director. Radner's understudy, Canadian comic actress Nancy Dolman began dating Short in 1974 and married him in 1980.

Attended and graduated from The Liggett School (now University Liggett School) in Grosse Pointe Woods, Michigan (1966).

Gilda Radner was one of the great comic geniuses of the 20th century, ranked with Lucille Ball and other comedy legends of the highest caliber. She was born on June 28, 1946, in Detroit, Michigan, the younger of two children of Henrietta (Dworkin), a legal secretary, and Herman Radner, a businessman. She had an older brother, Michael. Her family were Jewish immigrants (from Russia, Poland, and Lithuania).