Profile
Lily Tomlin
Comedian and Actor
Female
Born
Sep 1, 1939
Age
73
Hometown
Detroit
Genres
Observational com...
Nationality
American
Other Names
Tomlin, Mary Jean
Mary Jean "Lily" Tomlin is an American actress, comedienne, writer, and producer. Tomlin has been a major force in American comedy since the late 1960s when she began a career as a stand up comedian and became a featured performer on television's Laugh… Read More
Photos
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Places
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News + Updates
Browse recent news and stories about Lily Tomlin.
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Mark C. Miller: Want To Hear A Good Story?Huffington Post - May 02, 2013
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Lily Tomlin Speaks Up For Elephants In DocumentaryYahoo News - Apr 24, 2013
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Elizabeth Benedict: Hollywood Goes To College And Oh, The Application Essays They Write!Huffington Post - Apr 08, 2013
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Michael Giltz: Dv Ds: "Ripper Street," "Borgen," "Foyle's War" And More Great TvHuffington Post - Mar 29, 2013
Timeline
Learn about the memorable moments in the evolution of Lily Tomlin.
CHILDHOOD
1939
Birth
Born on September 1, 1939.
TEENAGE
TWENTIES
1965
25 Years Old
Her first television appearance was on The Merv Griffin Show in 1965.
1969
29 Years Old
In 1969, after a brief stint as a hostess on the ABC Television series Music Scene, Tomlin joined NBC's sketch comedy show Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In.
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THIRTIES
1970
30 Years Old
In 1970, AT&T offered Tomlin $500,000 to play her character Ernestine in a commercial, but she declined, saying it would compromise her artistic integrity.
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1971
31 Years Old
Tomlin released her first comedy album on Polydor Records in 1971, This Is A Recording, an album of Ernestine's run-ins with customers over the phone.
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1972
32 Years Old
Tomlin's second album, 1972's And That's The Truth, a collection of monologues as Edith Ann, was nearly as successful, peaking at #41 on the chart and earning another Grammy nomination. (Tomlin has two of the three top charting female comedy albums on Billboard, sandwiching a 1983 Joan Rivers release.)
1975
35 Years Old
Tomlin's third comedy album, 1975's Modern Scream, a parody of movie magazines and celebrity interviews features her performing as multiple characters, including Ernestine, Edith Ann, Judith, and Suzie.
Her 1977 release Lily Tomlin On Stage, was an adaptation of her Broadway show that year.
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1978
38 Years Old
One of the few widely panned projects of Tomlin's career, however, was 1978's Moment by Moment, directed and written by Wagner, which teamed Tomlin in a cross-generational older woman/younger man romance with John Travolta.
FORTIES
1980
40 Years Old
Tomlin soon had the greatest hit of her film career with 1980's Nine to Five in which she played a secretary named Violet Newstead who joins coworkers Jane Fonda and Dolly Parton in seeking revenge on their monstrous boss, Franklin M. Hart, Jr., played by Dabney Coleman.
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1981
41 Years Old
Tomlin then starred in the 1981 science fiction comedy The Incredible Shrinking Woman, a send-up of consumerism, and was the sickly heiress in the comedy All of Me opposite Steve Martin.
1985
45 Years Old
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In 1985, Tomlin starred in another one-woman Broadway show The Search For Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe, written by her long-time life partner, writer/producer Jane Wagner.
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Tomlin and Bette Midler played two pairs of identical twins who were switched at birth in the 1989 comedy Big Business.
FIFTIES
1994
54 Years Old
Tomlin voiced Ms. Frizzle on the animated television series The Magic School Bus from 1994 to 1997.
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LATE ADULTHOOD
In the 2008-2009 fifth season of Desperate Housewives she has a recurring role as Roberta, the sister of Mrs. McCluskey (played by Kathryn Joosten, who coincidentally had played Tomlin's secretarial predecessor on The West Wing).
2009
69 Years Old
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In March 2009, Tomlin received Fenway Health's Dr. Susan M. Love Award for her contributions to women's health.
In 2012, Tomlin guest starred on the HBO series Eastbound and Down.
Original Authors of this text are noted on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lily_Tomlin.
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Text is made available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License.