Radner was one of the great comic geniuses of the 20th century, ranked up with Lucille Ball and other comedy legends of the highest caliber. She was born on June 28, 1946 in Detroit, the younger of two children. Her parents were Herman and Henrietta Radner, and she had an older brother named Michael. She grew up with a nanny she always called Dibby, on whom she based her famous SNL character, hard-of-hearing news correspondent Emily Litella. She was very close to her father, and not as close to her mother, and tragically, her father died when she was 12, leaving her heartbroken. She was very overweight as a child, and because of this she suffered from anorexia and bulimia and became very thin. She overcame these disorders by 16 and was normal weight, yet if you watch some of her episodes of SNL 25 you can see that her weight sometimes goes down very low and she looks anorexic again. She graduated from the Liggett school for Girls and enrolled at the University of Michigan, but dropped out and followed a boyfriend to Canada, where she made her stage debut in Godspell, with John Belushi also starring. In 1975, Gilda was the first person ever cast for SNL 25, the show that would make her famous. She stayed on SNL for 5 years, from 1975 to 1980, and had a brief marriage to the SNL band guitarist G.E. Smith. On this show she created characters like Emily Litella, loudmouthed Roseanne Roseannadanna, nerd Lisa Loopner, and Baba Wawa, a talk show host with a speech impediment. Gilda left the show in 1980 and married actor Gene Wilder, whom she met on a movie set and fell in love with nearly on the spot. A short while after, Gilda started having pains in her upper legs, and she was eventually diagnosed with ovarian cancer. She went through lots of chemotherapy and treatment, and finally her doctors told her that she was in remission. In this period of time, Gilda wrote her autobiography, called "It's Always Something", about her battles with cancer. However, cancer was found in her liver and her lungs after a more comprehensive check a while later. Now it was too late to do something. Gilda died in her sleep on May 20, 1989.
SNL 25 (1975): $750/week (1975 season)

Dated Martin Short during the early seventies, after meeting him during the run of the legendary 1972 Toronto production of Godspell. In addition to Radner and Short, this production also starred Victor Garber, Eugene Levy, Dave Thomas and Andrea Martin, with Paul Shaffer as musical director. Radner's understudy, Canadian comic actress Nancy Dolman began dating Short in 1974 and married him in 1980. One of the members of the Comedy troupe Second City. Autobiography 1989: "It's Always Something" Interred at Long Ridge Cemetery, Stamford, Connecticut, USA. Her mother named her after the title character played by Rita Hayworth in the 1944 film "Gilda." Gene Wilder and Gilda's medical therapist Joanna Ball founded 'Gilda's Club' in 1994. It was Gilda Radner's wish that a place could be established where people of all ages diagnosed with cancer could come together and support one another through the illness. The centers are very homey, with an art center, exercise facility and game rooms. No such place existed when Gilda Radner battled her ovarian cancer. 'Gilda's Club' is now nationwide, with new centers opening up all over the United States. To date the only female player from "Saturday Night Live" to win an Outstanding Performance Emmy for her work on the show. (April 2004) Won a Posthumous Grammy for Best Spoken Word Or Non-Musical Recording in 1990. Was Russian American. Biography in: "American National Biography". Supplement 1, pp. 499-500. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. Classic recurring characters include Roseanne Rosannadanna, Judy Miller, Emily Litella, Baba Wawa (a parody of Barbara Walters), Lisa Loopner, Candy Slice, and Rhonda Weiss.