June 27, 1966
Dark
Shadows, premiered on ABC
The gothic soap opera that originally aired weekdays on the ABC television network, from June 27, 1966, to April 2,
1971. The show was created by Dan Curtis. The story bible, which was written by Art Wallace, does not mention any supernatural elements. It was unprecedented in daytime television
when ghosts were introduced about six months after it began.
The series became hugely popular when vampire Barnabas
Collins (Jonathan Frid) appeared a year into its run. Dark Shadows
also featured werewolves, zombies, man-made monsters, witches, warlocks, time travel, and a parallel
universe. A small company of actors
each played many roles (as actors came and went, some characters were played by
more than one actor). Major writers besides Art Wallace included Malcolm
Marmorstein, Sam Hall, Gordon
Russell, and Violet Welles.
Dark Shadows
was distinguished by its vividly melodramatic performances, atmospheric
interiors, memorable storylines, numerous dramatic plot twists, unusually
adventurous music score, and broad and epic cosmos of characters and heroic
adventures. Now regarded as something of a classic, it continues to enjoy an
intense cult following. Although the original series ran for only five years,
its scheduling as a daily daytime drama allowed it to amass more single
episodes during its run (1,225) than most other science-fiction/fantasy genre
series produced for English-language television, including Doctor Who and the entire Star Trek television franchise. Only the paranormal soap opera Passions, with a total of 2,231 episodes, has more.
Directors Tim Burton and Quentin Tarantino, and pop singer Madonna have publicly stated they are fans of the series. As
a child, Johnny Depp was so obsessed with Barnabas Collins that he wanted
to be him; he collaborated with Tim Burton on a
theatrical film adaptation which
opened in 2012, in which he plays Barnabas.
In 2004 and 2007, Dark Shadows was ranked #19
and #23 on TV Guide's Top Cult
Shows Ever
June 28, 1926
Mel Brooks is born Melvin James KaminskyHe is known as a creator of broad film farces and
comic parodies.
Brooks began his career as a comic and a writer for the early TV variety
show Your Show of Shows. He became well known
as part of the comedy duo with Carl
Reiner in the comedy skit, The 2000 Year Old Man. He also created, with Buck Henry,
the hit television comedy series, Get Smart,
which ran from 1965 to 1970.
In middle age, Brooks became one of the most successful
film directors of the 1970s, with many of his films being among the top 10
moneymakers of the year they were released. His best-known films include The Producers,The Twelve Chairs, Blazing
Saddles, Young Frankenstein, Silent
Movie, High Anxiety, History of the World, Part I,Spaceballs and Robin Hood: Men in Tights. A
musical adaptation of his first film, The Producers, ran on Broadway from
2001 to 2007.
In 2001, having previously won an Emmy,
a Grammy and
an Oscar, he joined a small list of EGOT
winners with his Tony award for The
Producers. He received a Kennedy Center Honor in 2009, the
41st AFI Life Achievement Award in June
2013, and a British Film Institute Fellowship in
March 2015. Three of his films ranked in theAmerican Film Institute's list of the top 100 comedy films of all-time, all
of which ranked in the top 20 of the list:Blazing Saddles at number
6, The Producers at number 11, and Young Frankenstein at
number 13.
Brooks was married to Oscar-winning actress Anne
Bancroft from 1964 until her death in 2005.
June 28, 1946
Gilda Susan Radner was born.
She was best known as one of the original cast members of the hit NBC sketch comedy
show Saturday Night
Live, for which she won an Emmy Award
in 1978.Radner was born in Detroit, Michigan, the daughter of Jewish parents Henrietta (née Dworkin), a legal
secretary, and Herman Radner, a businessman. She grew up in Detroit with a
nanny, Elizabeth Clementine Gillies, whom she called "Dibby" (and on
whom she based her famous character Emily Litella),[3]
and an older brother named Michael. She attended the University
Liggett School in Grosse Pointe.
Radner wrote in her autobiography It's Always Something that toward the
end of her life she, "coped with stress by having every possible eating
disorder from the time I was nine years old. I have weighed as much as 160
pounds and as little as 93. When I was a kid, I overate constantly. My weight
distressed my mother and she took me to a doctor who put me on Dexedrine
diet pills when I was ten years old."
Radner was close to her father, who operated Detroit's
Seville Hotel, where many nightclub performers and actors stayed while
performing in the city. He took her on trips to New York to see Broadway
shows. As Radner wrote in It's Always Something, when she was twelve her
father developed a brain tumor, and the symptoms began so suddenly that he told
people his eyeglasses were too tight. Within days he was bedridden and unable
to communicate, and he remained in that condition until his death two years
later.
Radner enrolled at the University of
Michigan at Ann Arbor,
where she made a lifelong platonic friend of fellow student David Saltman, who
wrote a biography of her after her death. Radner joined Saltman and his
girlfriend on a trip to Paris in the summer of 1966. Saltman wrote that he was so
affectionate with his girlfriend that they left Radner to fend for herself
during much of their sightseeing. Twenty years later, when many details of
Radner's eating disorder were reported in a bestselling book about Saturday
Night Live by Doug Hill and Jeff Weingrad, Saltman realized she had been in
a quandary over the French cuisine, but had no one with whom she could discuss her
situation.
In Ann Arbor,
Radner began her broadcasting career as the weather girl for college radio
station WCBN, but
dropped out in her senior year to follow her then-boyfriend, a Canadian
sculptor named Jeffrey
Rubinoff, to Toronto,
Canada. In Toronto, she made her professional acting debut in the 1972
production of Godspell with future stars Eugene Levy,
Andrea Martin, Victor Garber
and Martin Short. Afterward, Radner joined the Toronto Second City
comedy troupe.
Radner was a featured player on the National Lampoon Radio Hour, a comedy program syndicated to some 600
U.S. radio stations from 1974 to 1975. Fellow cast members included John Belushi,
Richard Belzer, Chevy Chase,
Bill Murray,
Brian Doyle-Murray, and Rhonda Coullet.
Radner gained name recognition as one of the original
"Not
Ready for Prime Time Players", a
member of the freshman group on the first season of Saturday Night Live.
She was the first performer cast for the show. Between 1975 and 1980, she
created such characters as obnoxious personal advice expert Roseanne
Roseannadanna, "Baba Wawa",
a parody of Barbara Walters, and Emily Litella,
an elderly hearing-impaired woman who gave angry and misinformed editorial
replies on "Weekend Update". Radner also parodied such celebrities as Lucille Ball,
Patti Smith,
and Olga Korbut in SNL sketches. She won an Emmy Award
in 1978 for her work on SNL.
Radner battled bulimia
during her time on the show. She once told a reporter that she had thrown up in
every toilet in Rockefeller Center. She had a relationship with SNL castmate Bill Murray,
with whom she had also worked at the National Lampoon, that ended badly.
Few details of their relationship or its end were made public at the time. When
Radner wrote It's Always Something, this is the only reference she made
to Murray in the entire book: "All the guys [in the National Lampoon
group of writers and performers] liked to have me around because I would laugh
at them till I peed in my pants and tears rolled out of my eyes. We worked
together for a couple of years creating The National Lampoon Show,
writing The National Lampoon Radio Hour, and even working on stuff for
the magazine. Bill Murray joined the show and Richard Belzer ..."
According to Bill Murray, last time Radner and he saw each other was at a party
thrown by Laraine Newman. Hearing she was leaving, Murray and Dan Akroyd
carried her around and around the house party, repeatedly saying goodbye to
everyone, and since all the guests were comedians, they all did comedy bits
with her, over and over.
In 1979, incoming NBC President Fred Silverman
offered Radner her own prime time variety show, which she ultimately turned
down. That year, she was one of the hosts of the Music for
UNICEF Concert at the United
Nations General Assembly.
Alan Zweibel,
who co-created the Roseanne Roseannadanna character and co-wrote all of
Roseanne's dialogue, recalled that Radner, one of three original SNL cast
members who stayed away from cocaine,
chastised him for using it.
Radner had mixed emotions about the fans and strangers
who recognized her in public. She sometimes became "angry when she was
approached, but upset when she wasn't."
In 1979, Radner appeared on Broadway in
a successful one-woman show entitled Gilda Radner - Live From New York.
The show featured material that was racier than what NBC censors allowed Saturday
Night Live to put on the television airwaves, such as the song Let's
Talk Dirty to the Animals. In 1979, shortly before Radner began her final
season on Saturday Night Live, her Broadway show was filmed by Mike Nichols
under the title Gilda Live!, co-starring Paul Shaffer
and Don Novello, and was released to theaters nationwide in 1980 with
poor results. A soundtrack album was also unsuccessful. During the production, she met
her first husband, G. E. Smith, a musician who also worked on the show. They were
married in a civil ceremony in 1980.
In the fall of 1980, after all original SNL
cast members departed from the show, Radner starred opposite Sam Waterston
in the Jean Kerr
play, Lunch Hour, as a pair whose spouses are having an affair, and in
response invent one of their own, consisting of trysts on their lunch hour. The
show ran for over seven months.
Radner met actor Gene Wilder
on the set of the Sidney Poitier film Hanky Panky, when the two appeared together. She described their
first meeting as "love at first sight." She was unable to resist her
attraction to Wilder as her marriage to guitarist G. E. Smith
deteriorated. Radner went on to make a second film, The
Woman in Red, released in 1984
with Wilder and their relationship grew. The two were married on September 18,
1984, in St. Tropez. The pair made a third film together, Haunted Honeymoon, released in 1986.
After experiencing severe fatigue and suffering from
pain in her upper legs on the set of Haunted Honeymoon in the United Kingdom
in 1985, Radner sought medical treatment. After 10 months of false diagnoses,
she learned that she had ovarian cancer
on October 21, 1986. She suffered extreme physical and emotional pain during chemotherapy
and radiotherapy treatment.
After Radner was told she had gone into remission, she wrote It's Always Something (a
catchphrase of her character Roseanne
Roseannadanna), which included many
details of her struggle with the illness. Life
magazine did a March 1988 cover story on her illness, entitled "Gilda
Radner's Answer to Cancer: Healing the Body with Mind and Heart." In 1988,
Radner guest-starred on It's
Garry Shandling's Show on Showtime, to great critical acclaim. When Shandling asked her
why she had not been seen in public for a while, she replied, "Oh, I had
cancer. What did you have?" Shandling's reply: "A very bad
series of career moves... which, by the way, there's no cure for
whatsoever." She also repeated on-camera Mark Twain's
apocryphal saying, "Reports of my death are greatly exaggerated."
Radner planned to host an episode of Saturday Night Live that
year, but a writers'
strike caused the cancellation of the
rest of the network television season.
In the fall of 1988, after biopsies and a saline wash
of her abdomen showed no signs of cancer, Radner was put on a maintenance
chemotherapy treatment to prolong her remission, but later that same year, she
learned that her cancer had returned after a routine blood test showed her
levels of the tumor marker CA-125 had increased. She was admitted to Cedars-Sinai
Medical Center in Los Angeles on May
17, 1989 for a CAT scan. Despite being fearful that she would never wake up,
she was given a sedative but passed into a coma during the scan. She did not
regain consciousness and died three days later from ovarian cancer
at 6:20 am on May 20, 1989; Wilder was at her side.
Gene Wilder had this to say about her death:
She went in for the scan – but the people there could
not keep her on the gurney. She was raving like a crazed woman – she knew they
would give her morphine and was afraid she’d never regain consciousness. She
kept getting off the cart as they were wheeling her out. Finally three people
were holding her gently and saying, "Come on Gilda. We’re just going to go
down and come back up." She kept saying, "Get me out, get me
out!" She’d look at me and beg me, "Help me out of here. I’ve got to
get out of here." And I’d tell her, "You’re okay honey. I know. I
know." They sedated her, and when she came back, she remained unconscious
for three days. I stayed at her side late into the night, sometimes sleeping
over. Finally a doctor told me to go home and get some sleep. At 4 am on
Saturday, I heard a pounding on my door. It was an old friend, a surgeon, who
told me, "Come on. It's time to go." When I got there, a night nurse,
whom I still want to thank, had washed Gilda and taken out all the tubes. She
put a pretty yellow barrette in her hair. She looked like an angel. So
peaceful. She was still alive, and as she lay there, I kissed her. But then her
breathing became irregular, and there were long gasps and little gasps. Two
hours after I arrived, Gilda was gone. While she was conscious, I never said
goodbye.
Her funeral was held in Connecticut on May 24, 1989.
In lieu of flowers, her family requested that donations be sent to The Wellness
Community. Her gravestone reads:
"Gilda Radner Wilder - Comedienne - Ballerina 1946-1989". She was
interred at Long Ridge Union Cemetery in Stamford,
Connecticut.
By coincidence, the news of her death broke on early
Saturday afternoon (Eastern Daylight Time), while Steve Martin
was rehearsing as the guest host for that night's season finale of Saturday
Night Live. Saturday Night Live personnel—including Lorne Michaels,
Phil Hartman,
and Mike Myers
(who had, in his own words, "fallen in love" with Radner after
playing her son in a BC Hydro commercial on Canadian television and considered her
the reason he wanted to be on SNL)—had not known she was so close to
death. They scrapped Martin's planned opening monologue and instead, Martin, in
tears, introduced a video clip of a 1978 sketch in which he and Radner parodied
Fred Astaire
and Cyd Charisse in a well-known dance routine from The Band Wagon.
Wilder established the Gilda Radner Ovarian Detection
Center at Cedars-Sinai to screen high-risk candidates (such as women of Ashkenazi Jewish descent) and run basic diagnostic tests. He testified before
a Congressional committee that Radner's condition had been misdiagnosed and
that if doctors had inquired more deeply into her family background they would
have learned that her grandmother, aunt and cousin had all died of ovarian
cancer, and therefore they might have attacked the disease earlier.
Radner's death from ovarian cancer helped to raise
awareness of early detection and the connection to familial epidemiology. The
media attention in the two years after Radner's death led to registry of 450
families with familial ovarian cancer at the Familial Ovarian Cancer Registry,
a research database registry at the Roswell
Park Cancer Institute in Buffalo, New
York. The registry was later renamed the Gilda Radner Familial Ovarian Cancer
Registry (GRFOCR). In 1996, Gene Wilder and Registry founder Steven Piver, one
of Radner's medical consultants, published Gilda's Disease: Sharing Personal
Experiences and a Medical Perspective on Ovarian Cancer. Through Wilder's
efforts and those of others, awareness of ovarian cancer and its symptoms has
continued to grow.
In 1991, Gilda's Club,
a network of affiliate clubhouses where people living with cancer, their
friends and families, can meet to learn how to live with cancer, was founded.
The center was named for a quip from Radner, who said, "Having cancer gave
me membership in an elite club I'd rather not belong to." Many Gilda's
Clubs have opened across the United States and in Canada. In 2009, Gilda's Club
merged with another similar institution, The Wellness Community, under the new
name of Cancer Support Community, which was legally adopted in 2011.
In 2002, the ABC television network aired a television movie about her
life: Gilda Radner: It's Always Something, starring Jami Gertz
as Radner.
In 2007 she was featured in the film Making Trouble,
a tribute to female Jewish comedians, produced by the Jewish Women’s
Archive.
Radner won an Emmy Award
for "Outstanding Continuing or Single Performance by a Supporting Actress
in Variety or Music" for her performance on Saturday Night Live in 1977. She posthumously won a Grammy for "Best Spoken
Word Or Non-Musical Recording" in 1990.
In 1992, Radner was inducted into the Michigan
Women's Hall of Fame for her
achievements in arts and entertainment. On June 27, 2003, she received a star
on the Hollywood Walk of
Fame at 6801 Hollywood Blvd.
Parts of West Houston Street in New York City, Lombard
Street in Toronto, and Chester Street in White Plains, New York have been
renamed "Gilda Radner Way."
June 27, 1966
Dark
Shadows, premiered on ABC
The series became hugely popular when vampire Barnabas
Collins (Jonathan Frid) appeared a year into its run. Dark Shadows
also featured werewolves, zombies, man-made monsters, witches, warlocks, time travel, and a parallel
universe. A small company of actors
each played many roles (as actors came and went, some characters were played by
more than one actor). Major writers besides Art Wallace included Malcolm
Marmorstein, Sam Hall, Gordon
Russell, and Violet Welles.
Dark Shadows
was distinguished by its vividly melodramatic performances, atmospheric
interiors, memorable storylines, numerous dramatic plot twists, unusually
adventurous music score, and broad and epic cosmos of characters and heroic
adventures. Now regarded as something of a classic, it continues to enjoy an
intense cult following. Although the original series ran for only five years,
its scheduling as a daily daytime drama allowed it to amass more single
episodes during its run (1,225) than most other science-fiction/fantasy genre
series produced for English-language television, including Doctor Who and the entire Star Trek television franchise. Only the paranormal soap opera Passions, with a total of 2,231 episodes, has more.
Directors Tim Burton and Quentin Tarantino, and pop singer Madonna have publicly stated they are fans of the series. As
a child, Johnny Depp was so obsessed with Barnabas Collins that he wanted
to be him; he collaborated with Tim Burton on a
theatrical film adaptation which
opened in 2012, in which he plays Barnabas.
In 2004 and 2007, Dark Shadows was ranked #19
and #23 on TV Guide's Top Cult
Shows Ever
He also created, with Buck Henry,
the hit television comedy series, Get Smart,
which ran from 1965 to 1970.
In middle age, Brooks became one of the most successful
film directors of the 1970s, with many of his films being among the top 10
moneymakers of the year they were released. His best-known films include The Producers,The Twelve Chairs, Blazing
Saddles, Young Frankenstein, Silent
Movie, High Anxiety, History of the World, Part I,Spaceballs and Robin Hood: Men in Tights. A
musical adaptation of his first film, The Producers, ran on Broadway from
2001 to 2007.
In 2001, having previously won an Emmy,
a Grammy and
an Oscar, he joined a small list of EGOT
winners with his Tony award for The
Producers. He received a Kennedy Center Honor in 2009, the
41st AFI Life Achievement Award in June
2013, and a British Film Institute Fellowship in
March 2015. Three of his films ranked in theAmerican Film Institute's list of the top 100 comedy films of all-time, all
of which ranked in the top 20 of the list:Blazing Saddles at number
6, The Producers at number 11, and Young Frankenstein at
number 13.
Brooks was married to Oscar-winning actress Anne
Bancroft from 1964 until her death in 2005.
June 28, 1946
Gilda Susan Radner was born.
She was best known as one of the original cast members of the hit NBC sketch comedy show Saturday Night Live, for which she won an Emmy Award in 1978.Radner was born in Detroit, Michigan, the daughter of Jewish parents Henrietta (née Dworkin), a legal
secretary, and Herman Radner, a businessman. She grew up in Detroit with a
nanny, Elizabeth Clementine Gillies, whom she called "Dibby" (and on
whom she based her famous character Emily Litella),[3]
and an older brother named Michael. She attended the University
Liggett School in Grosse Pointe.
Radner wrote in her autobiography It's Always Something that toward the
end of her life she, "coped with stress by having every possible eating
disorder from the time I was nine years old. I have weighed as much as 160
pounds and as little as 93. When I was a kid, I overate constantly. My weight
distressed my mother and she took me to a doctor who put me on Dexedrine
diet pills when I was ten years old."
Radner was close to her father, who operated Detroit's
Seville Hotel, where many nightclub performers and actors stayed while
performing in the city. He took her on trips to New York to see Broadway
shows. As Radner wrote in It's Always Something, when she was twelve her
father developed a brain tumor, and the symptoms began so suddenly that he told
people his eyeglasses were too tight. Within days he was bedridden and unable
to communicate, and he remained in that condition until his death two years
later.
Radner enrolled at the University of
Michigan at Ann Arbor,
where she made a lifelong platonic friend of fellow student David Saltman, who
wrote a biography of her after her death. Radner joined Saltman and his
girlfriend on a trip to Paris in the summer of 1966. Saltman wrote that he was so
affectionate with his girlfriend that they left Radner to fend for herself
during much of their sightseeing. Twenty years later, when many details of
Radner's eating disorder were reported in a bestselling book about Saturday
Night Live by Doug Hill and Jeff Weingrad, Saltman realized she had been in
a quandary over the French cuisine, but had no one with whom she could discuss her
situation.
In Ann Arbor,
Radner began her broadcasting career as the weather girl for college radio
station WCBN, but
dropped out in her senior year to follow her then-boyfriend, a Canadian
sculptor named Jeffrey
Rubinoff, to Toronto,
Canada. In Toronto, she made her professional acting debut in the 1972
production of Godspell with future stars Eugene Levy,
Andrea Martin, Victor Garber
and Martin Short. Afterward, Radner joined the Toronto Second City
comedy troupe.
Radner was a featured player on the National Lampoon Radio Hour, a comedy program syndicated to some 600
U.S. radio stations from 1974 to 1975. Fellow cast members included John Belushi,
Richard Belzer, Chevy Chase,
Bill Murray,
Brian Doyle-Murray, and Rhonda Coullet.
Radner gained name recognition as one of the original
"Not
Ready for Prime Time Players", a
member of the freshman group on the first season of Saturday Night Live.
She was the first performer cast for the show. Between 1975 and 1980, she
created such characters as obnoxious personal advice expert Roseanne
Roseannadanna, "Baba Wawa",
a parody of Barbara Walters, and Emily Litella,
an elderly hearing-impaired woman who gave angry and misinformed editorial
replies on "Weekend Update". Radner also parodied such celebrities as Lucille Ball,
Patti Smith,
and Olga Korbut in SNL sketches. She won an Emmy Award
in 1978 for her work on SNL.
Radner battled bulimia
during her time on the show. She once told a reporter that she had thrown up in
every toilet in Rockefeller Center. She had a relationship with SNL castmate Bill Murray,
with whom she had also worked at the National Lampoon, that ended badly.
Few details of their relationship or its end were made public at the time. When
Radner wrote It's Always Something, this is the only reference she made
to Murray in the entire book: "All the guys [in the National Lampoon
group of writers and performers] liked to have me around because I would laugh
at them till I peed in my pants and tears rolled out of my eyes. We worked
together for a couple of years creating The National Lampoon Show,
writing The National Lampoon Radio Hour, and even working on stuff for
the magazine. Bill Murray joined the show and Richard Belzer ..."
According to Bill Murray, last time Radner and he saw each other was at a party
thrown by Laraine Newman. Hearing she was leaving, Murray and Dan Akroyd
carried her around and around the house party, repeatedly saying goodbye to
everyone, and since all the guests were comedians, they all did comedy bits
with her, over and over.
In 1979, incoming NBC President Fred Silverman
offered Radner her own prime time variety show, which she ultimately turned
down. That year, she was one of the hosts of the Music for
UNICEF Concert at the United
Nations General Assembly.
Alan Zweibel,
who co-created the Roseanne Roseannadanna character and co-wrote all of
Roseanne's dialogue, recalled that Radner, one of three original SNL cast
members who stayed away from cocaine,
chastised him for using it.
Radner had mixed emotions about the fans and strangers
who recognized her in public. She sometimes became "angry when she was
approached, but upset when she wasn't."
In 1979, Radner appeared on Broadway in
a successful one-woman show entitled Gilda Radner - Live From New York.
The show featured material that was racier than what NBC censors allowed Saturday
Night Live to put on the television airwaves, such as the song Let's
Talk Dirty to the Animals. In 1979, shortly before Radner began her final
season on Saturday Night Live, her Broadway show was filmed by Mike Nichols
under the title Gilda Live!, co-starring Paul Shaffer
and Don Novello, and was released to theaters nationwide in 1980 with
poor results. A soundtrack album was also unsuccessful. During the production, she met
her first husband, G. E. Smith, a musician who also worked on the show. They were
married in a civil ceremony in 1980.
In the fall of 1980, after all original SNL
cast members departed from the show, Radner starred opposite Sam Waterston
in the Jean Kerr
play, Lunch Hour, as a pair whose spouses are having an affair, and in
response invent one of their own, consisting of trysts on their lunch hour. The
show ran for over seven months.
Radner met actor Gene Wilder
on the set of the Sidney Poitier film Hanky Panky, when the two appeared together. She described their
first meeting as "love at first sight." She was unable to resist her
attraction to Wilder as her marriage to guitarist G. E. Smith
deteriorated. Radner went on to make a second film, The
Woman in Red, released in 1984
with Wilder and their relationship grew. The two were married on September 18,
1984, in St. Tropez. The pair made a third film together, Haunted Honeymoon, released in 1986.
After experiencing severe fatigue and suffering from
pain in her upper legs on the set of Haunted Honeymoon in the United Kingdom
in 1985, Radner sought medical treatment. After 10 months of false diagnoses,
she learned that she had ovarian cancer
on October 21, 1986. She suffered extreme physical and emotional pain during chemotherapy
and radiotherapy treatment.
After Radner was told she had gone into remission, she wrote It's Always Something (a
catchphrase of her character Roseanne
Roseannadanna), which included many
details of her struggle with the illness. Life
magazine did a March 1988 cover story on her illness, entitled "Gilda
Radner's Answer to Cancer: Healing the Body with Mind and Heart." In 1988,
Radner guest-starred on It's
Garry Shandling's Show on Showtime, to great critical acclaim. When Shandling asked her
why she had not been seen in public for a while, she replied, "Oh, I had
cancer. What did you have?" Shandling's reply: "A very bad
series of career moves... which, by the way, there's no cure for
whatsoever." She also repeated on-camera Mark Twain's
apocryphal saying, "Reports of my death are greatly exaggerated."
Radner planned to host an episode of Saturday Night Live that
year, but a writers'
strike caused the cancellation of the
rest of the network television season.
In the fall of 1988, after biopsies and a saline wash
of her abdomen showed no signs of cancer, Radner was put on a maintenance
chemotherapy treatment to prolong her remission, but later that same year, she
learned that her cancer had returned after a routine blood test showed her
levels of the tumor marker CA-125 had increased. She was admitted to Cedars-Sinai
Medical Center in Los Angeles on May
17, 1989 for a CAT scan. Despite being fearful that she would never wake up,
she was given a sedative but passed into a coma during the scan. She did not
regain consciousness and died three days later from ovarian cancer
at 6:20 am on May 20, 1989; Wilder was at her side.
Gene Wilder had this to say about her death:
She went in for the scan – but the people there could
not keep her on the gurney. She was raving like a crazed woman – she knew they
would give her morphine and was afraid she’d never regain consciousness. She
kept getting off the cart as they were wheeling her out. Finally three people
were holding her gently and saying, "Come on Gilda. We’re just going to go
down and come back up." She kept saying, "Get me out, get me
out!" She’d look at me and beg me, "Help me out of here. I’ve got to
get out of here." And I’d tell her, "You’re okay honey. I know. I
know." They sedated her, and when she came back, she remained unconscious
for three days. I stayed at her side late into the night, sometimes sleeping
over. Finally a doctor told me to go home and get some sleep. At 4 am on
Saturday, I heard a pounding on my door. It was an old friend, a surgeon, who
told me, "Come on. It's time to go." When I got there, a night nurse,
whom I still want to thank, had washed Gilda and taken out all the tubes. She
put a pretty yellow barrette in her hair. She looked like an angel. So
peaceful. She was still alive, and as she lay there, I kissed her. But then her
breathing became irregular, and there were long gasps and little gasps. Two
hours after I arrived, Gilda was gone. While she was conscious, I never said
goodbye.
Her funeral was held in Connecticut on May 24, 1989.
In lieu of flowers, her family requested that donations be sent to The Wellness
Community. Her gravestone reads:
"Gilda Radner Wilder - Comedienne - Ballerina 1946-1989". She was
interred at Long Ridge Union Cemetery in Stamford,
Connecticut.
By coincidence, the news of her death broke on early
Saturday afternoon (Eastern Daylight Time), while Steve Martin
was rehearsing as the guest host for that night's season finale of Saturday
Night Live. Saturday Night Live personnel—including Lorne Michaels,
Phil Hartman,
and Mike Myers
(who had, in his own words, "fallen in love" with Radner after
playing her son in a BC Hydro commercial on Canadian television and considered her
the reason he wanted to be on SNL)—had not known she was so close to
death. They scrapped Martin's planned opening monologue and instead, Martin, in
tears, introduced a video clip of a 1978 sketch in which he and Radner parodied
Fred Astaire
and Cyd Charisse in a well-known dance routine from The Band Wagon.
Wilder established the Gilda Radner Ovarian Detection
Center at Cedars-Sinai to screen high-risk candidates (such as women of Ashkenazi Jewish descent) and run basic diagnostic tests. He testified before
a Congressional committee that Radner's condition had been misdiagnosed and
that if doctors had inquired more deeply into her family background they would
have learned that her grandmother, aunt and cousin had all died of ovarian
cancer, and therefore they might have attacked the disease earlier.
Radner's death from ovarian cancer helped to raise
awareness of early detection and the connection to familial epidemiology. The
media attention in the two years after Radner's death led to registry of 450
families with familial ovarian cancer at the Familial Ovarian Cancer Registry,
a research database registry at the Roswell
Park Cancer Institute in Buffalo, New
York. The registry was later renamed the Gilda Radner Familial Ovarian Cancer
Registry (GRFOCR). In 1996, Gene Wilder and Registry founder Steven Piver, one
of Radner's medical consultants, published Gilda's Disease: Sharing Personal
Experiences and a Medical Perspective on Ovarian Cancer. Through Wilder's
efforts and those of others, awareness of ovarian cancer and its symptoms has
continued to grow.
In 1991, Gilda's Club,
a network of affiliate clubhouses where people living with cancer, their
friends and families, can meet to learn how to live with cancer, was founded.
The center was named for a quip from Radner, who said, "Having cancer gave
me membership in an elite club I'd rather not belong to." Many Gilda's
Clubs have opened across the United States and in Canada. In 2009, Gilda's Club
merged with another similar institution, The Wellness Community, under the new
name of Cancer Support Community, which was legally adopted in 2011.
In 2002, the ABC television network aired a television movie about her
life: Gilda Radner: It's Always Something, starring Jami Gertz
as Radner.
In 2007 she was featured in the film Making Trouble,
a tribute to female Jewish comedians, produced by the Jewish Women’s
Archive.
Radner won an Emmy Award
for "Outstanding Continuing or Single Performance by a Supporting Actress
in Variety or Music" for her performance on Saturday Night Live in 1977. She posthumously won a Grammy for "Best Spoken
Word Or Non-Musical Recording" in 1990.
In 1992, Radner was inducted into the Michigan
Women's Hall of Fame for her
achievements in arts and entertainment. On June 27, 2003, she received a star
on the Hollywood Walk of
Fame at 6801 Hollywood Blvd.
Parts of West Houston Street in New York City, Lombard
Street in Toronto, and Chester Street in White Plains, New York have been
renamed "Gilda Radner Way."
The main roles in the television
series were played by the following African-American actors:
- Amos Jones - Alvin Childress
- Andrew Hogg Brown (Andy)
- Spencer Williams
- George "Kingfish" Stevens - Tim Moore
- Sapphire Stevens - Ernestine Wade
- Ramona Smith (Sapphire's Mama) - Amanda Randolph
- Madame Queen - Lillian Randolph
- Algonquin J. Calhoun -
Johnny Lee
- Lightnin' - Nick Stewart (aka, Nick O'Demus)
This time, the NAACP mounted a formal protest almost as soon as the
television version began, and that pressure was considered a primary factor in
the video version's cancellation (the sponsor, Blatz Beer, was targeted as
well, finally discontinuing their advertising support in June 1953). It has
been suggested that CBS erred in its choice of having the program premiere
during the NAACP national convention for that year, as the timing may have
increased the objections to it. The show was widely repeated in syndicated
reruns until 1966 when CBS acquiesced to pressure from the NAACP and the
growing civil
rights movement and withdrew the program. Until recently, the
television show had been released only on bootleg
videotape versions, but by 2005, 72 of the 78 known TV episodes were available
in bootleg DVD sets.
When the show was cancelled, 65 episodes had been produced. An additional 13
episodes were produced to be added to the syndicated rerun package. These
episodes were focused on Kingfish, with little participation from Amos 'n'
Andy. This is because these episodes were to be titled The Adventures of
Kingfish, but they premiered under the Amos 'n' Andy title instead.
The additional episodes first aired on CBS on January 4, 1955. Plans were made
for a vaudeville act of the television program in August 1953, with Tim Moore,
Alvin Childress and Spencer Williams playing the same roles. It is not known
whether there were any performances. Still eager for television success,
Gosden, Correll and CBS made initial efforts to give the series another try.
The plan was to begin televising Amos 'n' Andy in the fall of 1956, with
both of its creators appearing on television in a split screen with the
proposed African-American cast.
A group of cast members began a "TV Stars of Amos 'n' Andy"
cross-country tour in 1956, which was halted by CBS; the
network considered it an infringement of their exclusive rights to the show and
its characters. A similar tour had been planned by some cast members in 1953
after cancellation of the series. Following the threatened legal action which
brought the 1956 tour to an end, Moore, Childress, Williams and Lee were able
to perform like this for at least one night in 1957 in Windsor,
Ontario.
In 1978, a one-hour documentary film, Amos 'n' Andy: Anatomy of a
Controversy, aired in television syndication (and in
later years, on PBS).
It told a brief history of the franchise from its radio days to the CBS series,
and featured interviews with then-surviving cast members. The film also
contained a select complete episode of the classic TV series that had not been
seen since it was pulled from the air in 1966.
The main roles in the television
series were played by the following African-American actors:
- Amos Jones - Alvin Childress
- Andrew Hogg Brown (Andy)
- Spencer Williams
- George "Kingfish" Stevens - Tim Moore
- Sapphire Stevens - Ernestine Wade
- Ramona Smith (Sapphire's Mama) - Amanda Randolph
- Madame Queen - Lillian Randolph
- Algonquin J. Calhoun -
Johnny Lee
- Lightnin' - Nick Stewart (aka, Nick O'Demus)
This time, the NAACP mounted a formal protest almost as soon as the
television version began, and that pressure was considered a primary factor in
the video version's cancellation (the sponsor, Blatz Beer, was targeted as
well, finally discontinuing their advertising support in June 1953). It has
been suggested that CBS erred in its choice of having the program premiere
during the NAACP national convention for that year, as the timing may have
increased the objections to it. The show was widely repeated in syndicated
reruns until 1966 when CBS acquiesced to pressure from the NAACP and the
growing civil
rights movement and withdrew the program. Until recently, the
television show had been released only on bootleg
videotape versions, but by 2005, 72 of the 78 known TV episodes were available
in bootleg DVD sets.
When the show was cancelled, 65 episodes had been produced. An additional 13
episodes were produced to be added to the syndicated rerun package. These
episodes were focused on Kingfish, with little participation from Amos 'n'
Andy. This is because these episodes were to be titled The Adventures of
Kingfish, but they premiered under the Amos 'n' Andy title instead.
The additional episodes first aired on CBS on January 4, 1955. Plans were made
for a vaudeville act of the television program in August 1953, with Tim Moore,
Alvin Childress and Spencer Williams playing the same roles. It is not known
whether there were any performances. Still eager for television success,
Gosden, Correll and CBS made initial efforts to give the series another try.
The plan was to begin televising Amos 'n' Andy in the fall of 1956, with
both of its creators appearing on television in a split screen with the
proposed African-American cast.
A group of cast members began a "TV Stars of Amos 'n' Andy"
cross-country tour in 1956, which was halted by CBS; the
network considered it an infringement of their exclusive rights to the show and
its characters. A similar tour had been planned by some cast members in 1953
after cancellation of the series. Following the threatened legal action which
brought the 1956 tour to an end, Moore, Childress, Williams and Lee were able
to perform like this for at least one night in 1957 in Windsor,
Ontario.
In 1978, a one-hour documentary film, Amos 'n' Andy: Anatomy of a
Controversy, aired in television syndication (and in
later years, on PBS).
It told a brief history of the franchise from its radio days to the CBS series,
and featured interviews with then-surviving cast members. The film also
contained a select complete episode of the classic TV series that had not been
seen since it was pulled from the air in 1966.
