In Character
Fresh off her latest film success, Lily Tomlin brings decades of her comedic characters to Wilmington.
Wilmington is in for a treat February 4 when LILY TOMLIN performs at the Cape Fear Community College’s Humanities and Fine Arts Center.
Tomlin is associated with all the right names in the performing arts: Emmy, Grammy, Tony, Peabody, and Oscar, among others.
She has collected multiple awards during her ever-blossoming, five-decade career. She received an Emmy nomination for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Comedy Series in 2015 for her role in the Netflix series Grace and Frankie. And her name is back in the awards nomination mix this year for the movie Grandma, in which she plays the leading role. Tomlin was nominated for an Oscar in 1976 for her first film Nashville.
No stranger to Wilmington, Tomlin says she has friends in the area.
Her wife’s sister lives in Greensboro and will come to town to visit with them. If friend Linda Lavin is in town, she’d like to see her as well, Tomlin says.
Her show, An Evening of Classic Lily Tomlin, includes some of her fans’ favorite characters such as Edith Ann and Ernestine, both of them around since Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In days in the ’70s.
“She’ll be in the show,” Tomlin says when asked about Ernestine, the telephone operator whose nasal tone and disdainful attitude have entertained generations. The audience may also see Edith Ann, a precocious five-year-old who sits in an oversized rocking chair, dispensing youthful philosophy punctuated by a raspberry noise. Tomlin and wife, Jane Wagner, have collaborated on several projects, including the enrichment of Edith Ann.
Wagner and Tomlin created three animated specials and an educational app based on the Edith Ann character. Tomlin gives credit to others, talking about her brother’s talent as an artist and of Wagner’s creative genius. Tomlin won multiple awards for her one-woman performance of Wagner’s The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe.
“Jane is so witty. She starts and just makes me laugh until I’m sick,” says Tomlin, laughing as she talks. They are working on another project together, but all she will say about it is, “It’s a screenplay about life in New York.”
Never at a loss for projects, Tomlin has appeared in television, film, stage, animation, video, and radio during her career.
“Basically I like the theater the best because I can work on that whenever I want to,” she says when asked if she has a favorite medium. “But I’ve always been glad that I could do a little bit of everything – film, television, even radio. I’m glad I’ve had that opportunity.”
Having time to do stage productions depends on other commitments. She has done fifteen to twenty performances each in 2015 and 2014, while working on Grace and Frankie.
“When I’m not doing a series I usually do thirty or forty dates,” she says. “Mostly it’s a weekend kind of thing. I’ve never stopped doing dates from the time I was able to sell tickets.”
Tomlin has achieved a career level where some of her projects are custom pieces.
“It was written for me and Jane Fonda, and we were committed before it got finished,” she says of Grace and Frankie, a heartfelt comedy about two women whose husbands announce that they are in love with each other and the path of rediscovering their identities on their own. “Jane and I both wanted to do something for women of a certain age – how they are discounted by society, how they are just as vital and as young thinking as they ever were,” Tomlin says. “We just wrapped our second season, and we really think it’s better than the first season.”
She played another woman of a certain age in the film Grandma, a story about a grandmother whose granddaughter is pregnant and comes to her for help. Tomlin’s website describes her character this way: “Paul Weitz’s (About a Boy, In Good Company, Little Fockers, American Pie) new film achieves what few movies have before. It assumes that a woman can be old and interesting at the same time.”
Having a career that spans time, Tomlin has seen increased awareness for women in the workplace.
“Slowly, incrementally we’ve made improvements and changes, just in the pursuit of feminism, in giving opportunities to women and so on. I mean, we still have a ways to go,” she says. “There’s no real equality … Women are just more conscious of what their rights are and what they should have and are willing to struggle for them.”
Tomlin is aware of her opportunities and is getting roles based on her previous work.
“I did Admission. I had a feature role playing Tina Fey’s mother, and it was intelligently made. And then I had Grandma, and they were directed by the same guy, so that was sort of a lucky break,” she says about her most recent film projects, both with director Paul Weitz. “He worked with me on Admission and then got the idea to write Grandma with me in mind – never sure I was going to do it. But of course I loved the script. I thought it was really terrific.”
Her innate sense of humor shines through in her work, and the audience just knows she must have always been mischievous and funny growing up. She admits it.
“I think I was pretty funny – maybe not intentionally. I was known as the alibi artist,” Tomlin says. “Out of three years of high school, cumulatively, I was absent one year. I’d stay out twelve, thirteen days in a row if my hair didn’t turn out right.”
Her parents went to work before she went to school so they rarely knew she stayed home. After staying home for many days in a row one time, her counselor called and was “pontificating.” She makes a pontificating voice as she tells the story.
“He said ‘We’re concerned because you haven’t been to school in a couple of weeks. What happened?’ I said, ‘I scalded my legs. But I think I’ll be able to come to school tomorrow.’ I went in and put airplane glue on my legs to make it look like they were blistered, and I had a pair of nylons over that so it smashed it all down. And I then I had knee socks over that, and I went in and started to roll back the knee socks to show him. He said ‘Oh no, no that’s all right.’ That’s why I was called the alibi artist.”
Tomlin did make it through high school in Detroit, where she grew up, and started college, majoring in biology. She thought she might want to become a physician. But her first drama class changed everything, and she went on to a long career of making audiences laugh.
“It’s kind of a way of life in a sense,” Tomlin says. “I’ve been doing it so long, so consistently, and I’ve always just created an opportunity for myself.”
