Lily Tomlin
☼ Born on 1 December 1939, in Detroit, Michigan, USA
Biography
Lily Tomlin was born September 1, 1939 in Detroit, Michigan, to Lillie Mae (Ford) and Guy Tomlin, who moved to Michigan from Paducah, Kentucky, during the Great Depression. Her mother was a nurse's aide and her father was a factory worker. She graduated from Cass Technical High School in 1957, and later enrolled at Wayne State University. She began career by doing stand-up comedy in nightclubs in Detroit and New York City. Her first television appearance was on "The Merv Griffin Show". She went on to have astronomical success with several characters, notably Ernestine, a nosy, condescending telephone operator who generally treated customers with little sympathy and regard, on Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In (1967). Other notable characters are in film include Linnea Reese, a gospel-singing mother of two deaf children who has an affair with a womanizing country singer (played by (Keith Carradine) in Robert Altman's Nashville (1975), a performance for which she was nominated for an Academy Award. Violet Newstead who joins her on-screen coworkers (played by Jane Fonda and Dolly Parton) in seeking revenge on their monstrous and sexist boss, Franklin M. Hart Jr., (played by Dabney Coleman) in the comedy 9 to 5 (1980), The Incredible Shrinking Woman (1981), Doreen Piggot in Robert Altman's Short Cuts (1993), Cher's best-friend and American compatriot Georgie Rockwell in Tea with Mussolini (1999), deadpan private investigator, and existentialist Vivian Jaffe in I Heart Huckabees (2004), and
(click to expand)
Country-Western singer Rhonda Johnson in Robert Altman's final film A Prairie Home Companion (2006).
In the role of actor
Still Working 9 to 5 – Hot Docs 2022 (12/05/2022)
The filmmakers and stars of the film 9 to 5 reminisce on how it remains relevant 40 years later in Still Working 9 to 5. When it was released in 1980, the film 9 to 5 used satirical comedy to tell a story about women in the workplace. More than 40 years after the release […]
Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (09/12/2018)
Multiple iterations of the webcrawler team up in Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. Miles Morales (Shameik Moore) is an awkward teenager from Brooklyn, who has uneasy relationship with his police officer father Jefferson (Brian Tyree Henry). While spray-painting with his Uncle Aaron (Mahershala Ali), Miles is bitten by a spider and gains powers similar to that of Spider-Man […]
The Pink Panther 2 (08/02/2009)
The critical consensus on Rotten Tomatoes for this film (which actually went from the 6% Fresh I reported yesterday to 14% Fresh) say that “The Pink Panther 2 is little more than a series of lame slapstick gags.” And to that I reply “So?” It really confounds me when people expect a comedy to be […]