Today is the birthday of comedian Gilda Radner, born in Detroit in 1946. She struggled with eating disorders from the time she was nine years old, and said, “I have weighed as much as 160 pounds and as little as 93.” She gained national recognition as a member of the original 1975 cast of Saturday Night Live.
She was the first cast member that producer Lorne Michaels chose, and in her five years on the show she created such characters as Roseanne Roseannadanna, Emily Litella, and Baba Wawa (modeled after Barbara Walters).
In 1981, she met Gene Wilder on the set of the film Hanky Panky. They made two more movies together and married in 1984, and when she tried to get pregnant, she found out she had ovarian cancer. After radiation and chemotherapy treatments, she went into a brief remission in 1988, and she wrote her memoir It’s Always Something — the trademark phrase of her character Roseanne Roseannadanna — that same year. By the end of 1988, the cancer had returned, and she died the following May.
She wrote in her autobiography: “It is so hard for us little human beings to accept this deal that we get. It’s really crazy, isn’t it? We get to live, then we have to die. What we put into every moment is all we have. … What spirit human beings have! It is a pretty cheesy deal — all the pleasures of life, and then death.”
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