Gilda Radner

Gilda Susan Radner was born on June 28, 1946, in Detroit, Michigan, to Henrietta, a legal secretary, and Herman Radner, a businessman. Her father operated Detroit's Seville Hotel, where nightclub performers and actors frequently stayed, and he took her on trips to New York to see Broadway shows. Radner has stated that she was named after her grandmother, whose name began with the letter G, and that the specific name Gilda came from the film starring Glenn Ford and Rita Hayworth. Through her mother, she was a second cousin of business executive Steve Ballmer. She grew up in Detroit alongside an older brother, Michael, and spent winters in Miami Beach, Florida. The family's nanny, Elizabeth Clementine Gillies, whom Radner called "Dibby," would later serve as the basis for one of her most celebrated comedic characters. Radner attended the University Liggett School in Grosse Pointe Woods from 1957 to 1964 before enrolling at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, where she did weather reports at the campus radio station WCBN and participated in theater productions. In 1969, she left the university to follow her boyfriend, Canadian sculptor Jeffrey Rubinoff, to Toronto, where she eventually pursued acting after the relationship ended.

Radner made her professional acting debut in the 1972 Toronto production of Godspell, sharing the stage with future stars including Eugene Levy, Andrea Martin, Victor Garber, Martin Short, and Paul Shaffer. The following year she joined The Second City comedy troupe in Toronto, performing alongside 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 during this period. In 1975, Radner was cast as one of the seven original "Not Ready for Prime Time Players" on NBC's Saturday Night Live, and she was the first performer selected for the show, having chosen it over The David Steinberg Show in Canada. She remained with the program until 1980, co-writing much of her own material and collaborating with writer Alan Zweibel on sketches featuring her recurring characters.

Among the characters Radner developed for Saturday Night Live were Emily Litella, an elderly, hard-of-hearing editorialist who delivered irate, misinformed commentary on the Weekend Update segment before being corrected and responding with "Never mind," a character she based in part on her nanny Dibby. She also created Roseanne Roseannadanna, a commentator who regularly appeared on Weekend Update, ostensibly responding to questions from a viewer named Richard Feder in Fort Lee, and Judy Miller, a hyperactive eight-year-old girl with an overactive imagination whom Radner based on her own childhood. For her performances on the show, Radner won an Emmy Award in 1978.

Radner's Broadway career spanned from 1971 to 1980. She appeared in Godspell on Broadway and starred in Gilda Radner — Live From New York, her one-woman show that opened in 1979, in which she performed the characters she had developed on Saturday Night Live, among others. The show was subsequently filmed and released in 1980. She also starred in the Broadway play Lunch Hour alongside Sam Waterston in 1980.

After departing Saturday Night Live, Radner appeared in several films, including three alongside Gene Wilder, with whom she first appeared in the 1982 film Hanky Panky and who later became her husband. She continued working in television as well, making appearances on Lorne Michaels' The New Show and on It's Garry Shandling's Show. In 1986, after nearly a year of misdiagnoses, Radner was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. Shortly before her death, she published her autobiography, It's Always Something, which addressed her life, career, and her experience with illness. The title phrase had been associated with her SNL character Roseanne Roseannadanna and originated with her father. Radner died on May 20, 1989.

Following her death, Wilder carried out her wish that information about her illness be used to help others living with cancer, founding and inspiring the founding of organizations focused on early diagnosis, hereditary factors, and support for cancer patients. Radner was awarded a Grammy Award posthumously in 1990, inducted into the Michigan Women's Hall of Fame in 1992, and received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2003.