Detroit's funniest daughter, Mary Jean Tomlin was featured on Merv Griffin when she was twenty-six and landed a spot on Laugh-In when she was thirty, creating the telephone operator Ernestine. Wanting to expand
another character, Edith Ann, the bratty child in the big chair, Tomlin
found the Peabody-winning after school special writer Jane Wagner. They
clicked. They've been life partners and collaborators for forty-two years and now they're getting married. Wagner wrote and directed
Tomlin projects ranging from Grammy-winning comedy albums and Emmy-winning tv specials to hit movies (The Incredible Shrinking Woman) to super flops (Moment by Moment, co-starring John Travolta) to Tony-winning Broadway megahits (The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe). Beyond her endeavors with Wagner, Tomlin most frequently worked with Robert Altman (Nashville, Short Cuts, A Prairie Home Companion), and gave star performances in 9 to 5, All of Me, Big Business, and Flirting with Disaster. She's had recurring roles on many top tv shows Murphy Brown, The West Wing, Will & Grace, Desperate Housewives, and Damages. Most recently, she was Tina Fey's mom in the skippable Admission. In March 1977, when Time was still a news magazine, Tomlin was its cover story;
Wagner is identified first as "a friend" but later the article says
the ladies share a house off Sunset. Eighteen years ago, Tomlin co-produced and
narrated the gay Hollywood documentary The Celluloid Closet, an act some took as her coming out. She's a hysterical actress, obvs, but is she also a little hysterical? Her meltdowns on the set of I Heart Huckabees
are more than a little salty, yet minor compared to the tantrum thrown by the director. Remember, nothing is harder than comedy. Today she's 74.
Also born today: Roger Casement, the gay Irish rebel hanged by the Brits in 1916 and subject of Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa's novel The Dream of the Celt [Kindle]; Emma Stebbins, sculptor of the Central Park landmark Angel of the Waters, which you know as Bethesda Fountain, and girlfriend of actress Charlotte Cushman; and Dave King, author of the 2005 indie hit novel The Ha-Ha [Kindle] and husband of Franklin Tartaglione.
Comments