Gilda Radner

Radner was born in Detroit, Michigan, to Jewish parents, Henrietta (née Dworkin), a legal secretary, and Herman Radner, a businessman.[1][2] Through her mother, Radner was a second cousin of business executive Steve Ballmer.[3] She grew up in Detroit with a nanny, Elizabeth Clementine Gillies, whom she called "Dibby" (and on whom she based her famous character Emily Litella),[4] and an older brother named Michael. She attended the exclusive University Liggett School in Detroit. Toward the end of her life, Radner wrote in her autobiography, It's Always Something, that during her childhood and young adulthood, she battled numerous eating disorders: "I coped with stress by having every possible eating disorder from the time I was nine years old. I have weighed as much as 160 pounds and as little as 93. When I was a kid, I overate constantly. My weight distressed my mother and she took me to a doctor who put me on Dexedrine diet pills when I was ten years old."[5]

Radner was close to her father, who operated Detroit's Seville Hotel, where many nightclub performers and actors stayed while performing in the city.[6] He took her on trips to New York to see Broadway shows.[7] As Radner wrote in It's Always Something, when she was 12, her father developed a brain tumor, and the symptoms began so suddenly that he told people his eyeglasses were too tight.[8] Within days, he was bedridden and unable to communicate, and remained in that condition until his death two years later.[8]

Radner graduated from Liggett and enrolled at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor in 1964.[9] She planned to get an education degree.[10]

In Ann Arbor, Radner dropped out in her senior year[11] to follow her boyfriend, Canadian sculptor Jeffrey Rubinoff, to Toronto, where she made her professional acting debut in the 1972 production of Godspell with future stars Eugene Levy, Andrea Martin, Victor Garber, Martin Short, and Paul Shaffer. Afterward, Radner joined The Second City comedy troupe in Toronto.

Radner was a featured player on the National Lampoon Radio Hour, a comedy program syndicated to some 600 U.S. radio stations from 1974 to 1975. Fellow cast members included John Belushi,[12] Chevy Chase,[12] Richard Belzer, Bill Murray, Brian Doyle-Murray, and Rhonda Coullet.

Radner with Gene Wilder in 1986

Radner was first married to musician G. E. Smith; they divorced in 1982.[28][29] Radner met actor Gene Wilder on the set of the Sidney Poitier film Hanky Panky (released in 1982), when the two worked together making the film. She described their first meeting as "love at first sight".[11] After meeting Wilder, her marriage to guitarist G. E. Smith deteriorated. Radner went on to make a second film with Wilder, The Woman in Red (released in 1984), and their relationship grew. The two were married on September 18, 1984, in Saint-Tropez.[11] The pair made a third film together, Haunted Honeymoon (released in 1986)[11] and remained married until her death in 1989.

Details of Radner's eating disorder were reported in a book about Saturday Night Live by Doug Hill and Jeff Weingrad,[21] The book by Hill and Weingrad was published and received much media coverage during a period when Radner was consulting various doctors in Los Angeles about her symptoms of illness that turned out to be cancer.

Radner's star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame

In 1985, Radner was experiencing severe fatigue and suffered from pain in her upper legs on the set of Haunted Honeymoon in the United Kingdom. She sought medical treatment, and for a period of 10 months, various doctors, most of them in Los Angeles, gave her several diagnoses that all turned out to be wrong because she continued to experience pain.[11]

During those 10 months, she faced hardships such as the publication of Hill and Weingrad's highly publicized book about Saturday Night Live, which provided many details about her eating disorder[21][11] as well as the financial failure of Haunted Honeymoon, which grossed only $8,000,000 in the United States, entering the box office at number 8, then slipping to 14 the following week. As Radner wrote in It's Always Something:

On July 26 [1986], Haunted Honeymoon opened nationwide. It was a bomb. One month of publicity and the movie was only in the theaters for a week – a box-office disaster.[11]

Finally, on October 21, 1986, Radner was diagnosed with stage IV ovarian cancer.[11][30] She immediately underwent surgery and had a hysterectomy.[30] On October 26, surgeons removed a grapefruit-size tumor from her abdomen. Radner then began chemotherapy and radiation therapy treatment, as she wrote in It's Always Something, and the treatment caused extreme physical and emotional pain.[11]

After her diagnosis, the National Enquirer ran the headline "Gilda Radner In Life-Death Struggle" in its following issue. Without asking for her comment,[11] the editors of the publication asserted that she was dying. Radner wrote in It's Always Something:

They found an old photo of me looking frightened from a 'Saturday Night Live' sketch and blew that up to make the point. What they did probably sold newspapers, but it had a devastating effect on my family and my friends. It forced Gene [Wilder] to compose a press release to respond. He said that I had been diagnosed with ovarian cancer, had had surgery, and my prognosis was good. The Enquirer doesn't like good news, so the Gilda Radner story stopped running.[11]

Four months after her ordeal with the National Enquirer, Radner saw her Saturday Night Live castmates one last time at Laraine Newman's 35th birthday party (in March 1987). According to Bill Murray[31] when he heard she was leaving the party, he and Dan Aykroyd carried her around the Los Angeles house where the party was held, repeatedly saying goodbye to everyone.

Cedars-Sinai Medical Center hosts the Gilda Radner Ovarian Detection Center

Wilder established the Gilda Radner Hereditary Cancer Program[36] at Cedars-Sinai to screen high-risk candidates (such as women of Ashkenazi Jewish descent) and to run basic diagnostic tests. He testified before a Congressional committee that Radner's condition had been misdiagnosed and that if doctors had inquired more deeply into her family background they would have learned that her grandmother, aunt, and cousin all died of ovarian cancer, and therefore they might have attacked the disease earlier.[37]

Radner's death helped raise awareness of early detection of ovarian cancer and the connection to familial epidemiology.[38] The media attention in the two years after Radner's death led to registry of 450 families with familial ovarian cancer at the Familial Ovarian Cancer Registry, a research database registry at the Roswell Park Cancer Institute in Buffalo, New York. The registry was later renamed the Gilda Radner Familial Ovarian Cancer Registry (GRFOCR).[39] In 1996, Gene Wilder and Registry founder Steven Piver, one of Radner's medical consultants, published Gilda's Disease: Sharing Personal Experiences and a Medical Perspective on Ovarian Cancer.

In 1991, Gilda's Club, a network of affiliate clubhouses where people living with cancer, their friends, and families, can meet to learn how to live with cancer, was founded by Joanna Bull, Radner's cancer psychotherapist, along with Radner's widower, Gene Wilder (also a cancer survivor) and broadcaster Joel Siegel (who later died after a long battle with cancer). The first club opened in New York City in 1995. The organization took its name from Radner's comment that cancer gave her "membership to an elite club I'd rather not belong to".[40] Radner's story can be read in her book, It's Always Something.[11]

Many Gilda's Clubs have opened across the United States and in Canada. In July 2009, Gilda's Club Worldwide merged with The Wellness Community, another established cancer support organization; the name Cancer Support Community (CSC) was legally adopted in 2011 by the merged organization.[41][42][43] As of 2012, more than 20 local affiliates of Gilda's Club were active. Although some local affiliates of Gilda's Club and The Wellness Community have retained their names, many affiliates have adopted the name Cancer Support Community following the merger.[33]

In 2002, the ABC television network dedicated a three-hour block of programming to Radner. The evening kicked off with a one-hour special, "Gilda Radner's Greatest Moments." Hosted by Saturday Night Live alumna Molly Shannon, the special featured highlights from her career and appearances by friends and co-stars Victor Garber, Kermit the Frog, Eugene Levy, Steve Martin, Paul Shaffer, Lily Tomlin and Barbara Walters. It was followed by a television movie about her life: Gilda Radner: It's Always Something, starring Jami Gertz as Radner.

In 2007, Radner was featured in Making Trouble, a film tribute to female Jewish comedians, produced by the Jewish Women's Archive.[44] Radner makes two comic book appearances. DC Comics Young Love #122 in 1976 and Marvel Team-Up #74 from 1978.

Radner won an Emmy Award for "Outstanding Continuing or Single Performance by a Supporting Actress in Variety or Music" for her performance on Saturday Night Live in 1977. She posthumously won a Grammy Award for "Best Spoken Word Or Non-Musical Recording" in 1990.

In 1992, Radner was inducted into the Michigan Women's Hall of Fame for her achievements in arts and entertainment. Through the generosity of many who participated in the 2002 ABC special, "Gilda Radner's Greatest Moments," including Lynda Carter, Victor Garber, Eric Idle, David Letterman, Eugene Levy, Peter Mann, Steve Martin, Mike Myers, Paul Shaffer, Lily Tomlin and The Jim Henson Company, producer/actor James Tumminia spearheaded a campaign to dedicate a posthumous star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame to Gilda. On June 27, 2003, Gilda received her star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6801 Hollywood Blvd. Saturday Night Live alumna Molly Shannon (and the host of the ABC special) served as Master of Ceremonies at the induction ceremony at which Laraine Newman, Gilda's Club founder Joanna Bull and Gilda's brother Michael F. Radner appeared to present the honor.[45]

Parts of West Houston Street in New York City, Lombard Street in Toronto, and Chester Avenue in White Plains, New York, have been renamed "Gilda Radner Way". The private road off Kirk Road in Warminster Township, Pennsylvania leading to the Cancer Support Community Greater Philadelphia (formerly Gilda's Club Delaware Valley) is also thus named.

• Friends of Gilda

• Cancer Support Community (formerly Gilda's Club)
• Gilda Radner Hereditary Cancer Program
• Gilda Radner Familial Ovarian Cancer Registry
• Gilda Radner on IMDb
• Gilda Radner at the Internet Broadway Database
• Jewish Women in Comedy – Gilda Radner