Comedian
« Previous EntriesPeter Sellers
Richard Henry Sellers, CBE, commonly known as Peter Sellers (8 September 1925 – 24 July 1980) was a British comedian and actor best known for his roles in Dr. Strangelove, as Chief Inspector Clouseau in The Pink Panther film series, as Clare Quilty in the original 1962 screen version of Lolita, and as the guileless man-child Chance in his penultimate film, Being There. Read the rest of this entry »
Edie Adams
Edie Adams (April 16, 1927 – October 15, 2008) was an American singer, Broadway, television and film actress and comedienne. Adams, a Tony Award winner, “both embodied and winked at the stereotypes of fetching chanteuse and sexpot blonde.”
Biography
Adams was born as Edith Elizabeth Enke in Kingston, Pennsylvania, and grew up in Tenafly, New Jersey. Read the rest of this entry »
Lily Tomlin
Mary Jean “Lily” Tomlin (born September 1, 1939) is an American actress, comedian, writer and producer. She has won multiple awards from many quarters, including Tony Awards, Emmy Awards, and a Grammy Award and has also been nominated for an Academy Award.
Early life
Tomlin was born in Detroit, Michigan, and raised in the Brewster-Douglass Housing Projects, [...]
Joe E. Brown
Joseph Evans Brown (28 July 1892 – 6 July 1973) was an American actor and comedian. In 1902 at the age of 10, he joined a troupe of circus tumblers known as the Five Marvellous Astons which toured the country on both the circus and vaudeville circuits. He gradually added comedy into his act and [...]
Diane Keaton
If my film makes one more person miserable, I’ll feel I’ve done my job.
— Woody Allen
A PALE, bespectacled, 120-pound neurotic, Woody Allen polished his misfit persona in Greenwich Village cafes before recording three hit comedy albums in the sixties. In his early twenties, he was already joking about his divorce from Harlene Rosen (they had [...]
Tracey Ullman
Go Home! Go Home!
— Tracey Ullman’s exhortation to the audience at the end of each episode of The Tracey Ullman Show
David Spade
Basically, I’m not really cool, it’s more of an optical illusion. But, if it works, I’ll take it.
— David Spade
BORN in Michigan, David Spade moved to what he considers his real home, Scottsdale, Arizona — a sizable desert burgh that promotes itself as “The West’s Most Western Town” — at the age of 4. The [...]
Roseanne
I’m only upset that I’m not a widow.
— Roseanne on her ex-husband Tom Arnold
OVERWEIGHT, raucous, and foul-mouthed — and once described as “Donna Reed fattened up for veal” — Roseanne was the antithesis of the ideal sitcom mom. But Roseanne, her unglamorous, unidealized sitcom, was an instant winner when it debuted, in 1988, knocking the [...]
Joan Rivers
Can we talk?
— Joan Rivers
ONCE upon a time, there were only two comediennes: Totie Fields and Phyllis Diller. Joan Rivers, a formerly fat, formerly Cyrano-nosed, formerly married, former Lord & Taylor publicist with a Phi Beta Kappa degree from Barnard, decided to become the third. Struggling for seven years as a stand-up comic at a [...]
Whoopi Goldberg
I don’t like driving very much. That makes me very unhappy, because I scream a lot in the car, but other than that, life is actually pretty good.
— Whoopi Goldberg
CARYN JOHNSON has been performing in front of audiences since the age of 8, when she first appeared onstage at the Helena Rubinstein Children’s Theatre in [...]
