Short Biography

Mary Jean “Lily” Tomlin (born September 1, 1939) is an American actress, comedian, writer and producer who has won several Tony Awards and Emmy Awards, plus a Grammy Award. During her 40-year career she was also nominated for an Academy Award.

Tomlin was born in Detroit, Michigan, the daughter of Lillie Mae (née Ford), a housewife and nurse`s aide, and Guy Tomlin, a factory worker.[1] Tomlin`s parents were Southern Baptists who moved to Detroit from Paducah, Kentucky during the Great Depression.[2][3][4] She is a 1957 graduate of Cass Technical High School. Tomlin attended Wayne State University, where her interest in the theater and performing arts began. After college, Tomlin began doing stand-up comedy in nightclubs in Detroit and later in New York City. Her first television appearance was on The Merv Griffin Show in 1965.

In 1969, Tomlin joined the sketch comedy show Laugh-In. Some characters from the show have been associated with her throughout her career, including the gum-chewing, wisecracking, snorting telephone operator, Ernestine; the bratty five-year-old Edith Ann, seated in an over-sized rocking chair making rude noises while telling stories about her baby brother and pet dog Buster; and the Tasteful Lady, who lives a gracious, naїve life of entitlement in the upper class and shades of whom show up in Tomlin`s film role in All of Me (see below). Additional characters include Susie the Sorority Girl, who appeared on Tomlin`s album Modern Scream and in her 1975 appearance on Saturday Night Live.

Tomlin was also one of the first female comedians to break out in male drag. Though drag had been around in Hollywood for some time by men, Tomlin broke new ground by not only crossing gender stereotypes, but racial ones as well. She accomplished this in the late 70`s with Pervis Hawkins, a black rhythm-and-blues soul singer (patterned after Luther Vandross), with a mustache, beard and close-cropped afro hairstyle, dressed in a three-piece suit. Tomlin used very little if any skin-darkening cosmetics (it usually depended on stage lighting) as part of the character.

AT&T offered Tomlin US$500,000 to play her character Ernestine in a commercial, but she declined saying it would compromise her artistic integrity. However, in 1976 she did appear as Ernestine in a parody of a commercial on Saturday Night Live , in which she proclaimed, "We don`t care, we don`t have to...we`re the phone company." The character would later make a guest appearance at The Superhighway Summit at UCLA, January 11, 1994, interrupting a speech being given on the information superhighway by then-Vice President Al Gore. In 2003, she made two commercials as Ernestine for WebEx.

Tomlin is noted for her versatility. In Robert Altman`s Nashville, for which she was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress, she played Linnea Reese, a straitlaced, gospel-singing mother of two deaf children who has an affair with a country singer played by Keith Carradine. She was also a secretary Violet Newstead in Nine to Five, performed several comedic roles in the 1981 film The Incredible Shrinking Woman, and was a sickly heiress in the Steve Martin comedy All of Me.

She and Bette Midler played two pairs of identical twins who were switched at birth in the 1989 comedy Big Business, set at the Plaza Hotel in New York City. Tomlin also played chain-smoking waitress Doreen Piggott in Altman`s 1993 ensemble film Short Cuts,

Miscellaneous Information

Measurements

Bust: 34" C  Waist: 25"  Hips: 35"

Friends and Family

Guy Tomlin [Father]

Lillie Mae (née Ford) [Mother]

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