100 WOMEN WE LOVE 2008
Lily Tomlin’s extraordinary career as a funny lady bloomed on the TV show Laugh-In in 1969, the year of the Stonewall rebellion. Fittingly, she has woven feminism and LGBT life into her characters—the not-so-hardworking phone operator Ernestine, Violet Newstead in 9 to 5 and the numerous personas populating The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe, the one-woman play written by Tomlin’s partner Jane Wagner, for which Tomlin won a Tony Award. She was also nominated for an Academy Award for her turn as Linnea Reese in Robert Altman’s Nashville, played recurring roles on TV shows from Murphy Brown to The West Wing, and has won six Emmys, a Grammy, and a Lifetime Achievement Tony Award in 1977. Tomlin, who has called Wagner the most influential person in her life and career, narrated 1995’s landmark LGBT documentary The Celluloid Closet. –KL
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Hats off to the 100 Women We Love, class of 2008 (in no particular order, ’cause we love ’em all!).
Effie Brown
The women of color that Effie Brown remembers from the movies of her youth were prostitutes, drug addicts and impoverished single mothers. The lack of positive on-screen role models in Brown’s Jersey City childhood drives her work with her 7-year-old film production company, Duly Noted, Inc. “I am most passionate about doing films about marginal groups,” she says. “I’m sort of over the movie about the white guy getting the girl.” With producing credits including Jamie Babbitt’s But I’m a Cheerleader and Patricia Cardosa’s Real Women Have Curves, Brown is certainly living out her mission. And her efforts have not gone unrecognized; she was honored with the Motorola Producer Award at the 2003 Independent Spirit Awards. –LL
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