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!).
Nikki Weiss
Producer, manager and representative Nikki Weiss recently returned to her acting roots in the role of a murder suspect in Strawberry Blonde Productions’ What’s True, which debuted this spring at Cannes. Weiss co-founded Strawberry Blonde with Helene Shaw and What’s True screenwriter Trish Doolan, adding that credit to her already stellar résumé. She began as an actress and model but switched paths soon after college. “I didn’t really want to starve for my art, and I made a conscious decision at the age of 21 that I wanted to have more control and more financial freedom,” she says. Weiss then landed a job as an assistant agent in Chicago, and the following year, she was asked to open the Midwest division of New York’s Tim Case & Associates. In 1994, she opened Nikki Weiss & Company, which has become a leading name in representation for effects houses, editors, composers and directors such as Jason Reitman and Vadim Perelman. Her firm’s media division represents Dirty Sexy Money’s Candis Cayne, the first transgender actress to play a recurring role on prime-time, network television. –CL
In no particular order…
