Create a free profile to get unlimited access to exclusive show news, updates, and more!
See Young Gilda Radner During Her Saturday Night Live Years
She was the first Not Ready for Prime Time Player that Lorne Michaels hired.
The hysterical Gilda Radner was the first person Lorne Michaels hired as a cast member on the sketch show that became Saturday Night Live. And it's easy to see why: Her characters are original and bubbly, and her real-life personality was enchanting according to all who worked with her.
"I loved Gilda. She and Laraine and I shared a dressing room the first year of the show. She would lead the conversation. She was amazing," her cast mate Jane Curtin told the Television Academy in 2016. "She had so much to put out there — I'm a New Englander, I don't put everything out there. But watching Gilda and the effect she had on audiences and on everybody in the room — not many people have that gift. The audience lapped it up."
“I felt there was a remarkable quality to her, a goodness which came through whatever she was doing,'' Michaels told the New York Times in the outlet's obituary following her death from ovarian cancer at age 42 in 1989.
A three-time Emmy nominee for her work on SNL, Radner won a trophy in 1978, and she was posthumously inducted into the Television Hall of Fame in 2017.
RELATED: Why the First Saturday Night Live Cast Were Called The Not Ready for Prime Time Players
What years was Gilda Radner on SNL?
1975-1980.
Radner's tenure on Saturday Night Live began with the debut episode on October 11, 1975, and ended in Season 5.
Who did Gilda Radner play on SNL?
Radner was known for zany original characters like the prone-to-misunderstanding Emily Litella, the tells-it-like-it-is Roseanne Roseannadanna and the hyper Judy Miller. She also starred with Bill Murray in the recurring "The Nerds" sketches.
She also played characters based on real-life people. Baba Wawa was her version of Barbara Walters, an impression that Walters chafed at before coming around (it was Walters' daughter that got her to "lighten up," Walters said, per People).
She also played real-life Olympic gymnast Olga Korbut in a sketch about her loss to Nadia Comăneci at the 1976 Olympics. "I would like to take that balance beam and stick it in her eye," she famously deadpanned.
RELATED: SNL's Olga Korbut Sketch Tackles a Real Moment in Olympic Gymnastics History
Lorne Michaels produced her Broadway show
Between the fourth and fifth seasons of SNL, Radner fulfilled her lifelong dream of performing on Broadway in Gilda Radner Live on Broadway, a one-woman musical variety show produced by Michaels and featuring some of Radner's best characters.
RELATED: Amy Poehler Tells Kelly Clarkson the Pre-SNL Ritual She Borrowed from Molly Shannon
Longtime SNL writer Alan Zweibel revealed in a Vulture interview that each of the three women in the Season 1 SNL cast brought their own style of humor to the program.
"Of the three women, Jane Curtin did certain roles, Laraine [Newman] did certain roles, and Gilda did certain roles," Zweibel, who had a close friendship with Radner, said.
"I can’t remember any time she said to me, 'I wish I did that,' 'I wish they’d given me that role," Zweibel added. "She was very well serviced by me, by [SNL writers] Rosie Shuster and Anne Beatts, by Marilyn Miller."
“In the early day of Saturday Night Live, we had our innocence and we believed in making comedy and making each other laugh," Radner wrote in her memoir It's Always Something, published the year of her death. "We were just working together to entertain, like kids playing together.”
