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
In no particular order…
Hats off to the 100 Women We Love, class of 2008 (in no particular order, ’cause we love ’em all!).
Deb Margolin
“When the lights come up and there’s a woman standing there, that is a radical act,” says award-winning playwright and performance artist Deb Margolin, who first came into the spotlight as a founding member of the feminist performance group Split Britches. Since going solo, she’s written and performed tirelessly, garnering an Obie Award for Sustained Excellence of Performance in 2000. Her play Three Seconds in the Key, which was based on her experience with Hodgkins disease, earned her 2005’s Kesselring Prize for playwriting. That same year, she was awarded the Richard H. Brodhead Prize for Teaching Excellence at Yale, where she is an adjunct professor of theater studies. Her most recent work, 2007’s O Yes I Will (I will remember the spirit and texture of this conversation) is a about her experience with general anesthesia. “I embody my own experiences,” she says, “or experiences that I cannot die without talking about.” –LM
In no particular order…
