6 Things You Didn’t Know About Original ‘Saturday Night Live’ Star Gilda Radner
Though the original cast of Saturday Night Live was stacked with future comedy legends including Dan Aykroyd, Chevy Chase, John Belushi and Jane Curtin, Gilda Radner holds a special place in the heart of comedy fans. Radner’s exuberant, energetic characters like newscaster Roseanne Roseannadanna, hyperactive preteen Judy Miller and “Nerd” Lisa Loopner helped make the show an instant success, and Radner a household name, especially among the youthful baby boomers who made the show a hit.
Radner left SNL in 1980 and died tragically only nine years later, at age 42, of ovarian cancer. Though her post-SNL work didn’t quite reach the highs that her iconic run on the show did, she remains a legend and an inspiration, especially to female comedians.
Here are six things you probably didn’t know about the woman behind the jokes.
1 She got her start in Canada (even though she was American)
Magnolia Pictures /Courtesy Everett Collection
Radner began her career working in Toronto alongside some of the famous Canadian comedians of her generation, including Martin Short and Eugene Levy, which has led many to assume that Radner was Canadian herself.
But while she spent the better part of a decade in Toronto — a place she described as “the answer to my dreams … a young city, open to new ideas” — Radner was born and raised in Detroit, Michigan, and even attended the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor for several years. But after dropping out her senior year to follow a boyfriend who had moved to Toronto, her comedy career took off.
2 She appeared in a play with five other future stars
Radner’s first professional gig was performing in a 1972 Toronto production of Godspell, which just so happened to also include several future superstars, including Short, Levy, Paul Shaffer and Victor Garber, as well as Canadian American comedienne Andrea Martin. The actors became friends, and also came into contact with other future Canadian stars, including Aykroyd and Catherine O’Hara (who had auditioned for the play but hadn’t landed a role).
Radner began dating Short during the production, and was generally beloved by the cast; in a 2022 Washington Post article on the production, cast member Jayne Eastwood remembered Radner showing up to rehearsals with a purse full of candy to distribute.
The cast stayed tight afterwards: Levy officiated one of Short’s sons’ weddings, Shaffer and Radner collaborated on her comedy album, Levy nursed Shaffer back to health after a car accident, and Andrea Martin even married Martin Short’s wife’s brother, becoming his sister-in-law.
3 Her first breakout SNL character was based on her nanny
Radner’s work on Godspell got her a job on the National Lampoon Radio Hour, alongside future SNL costars Belushi and Chase, which led to a gig as part of the inaugural cast of SNL.
Though Radner is remembered for a variety of personas, her first repeating character was Emily Litella, a frequently baffled and hard-of-hearing elderly woman who was prone to comedic confusion, which she often dismissed with her catchphrase “Never mind.”
Litella wasn’t a pure comedic creation; in fact, she was based on Radner’s own childhood nanny. In a 1978 CBC interview, she said that Litella was inspired by “a lady who lives in Stony Creek, Ontario, Mrs. Gilles, who raised me. She’s 84 years old, and she’s Emily Litella. She has all those … difficulties Emily does.”
In a 1983 episode of Late Night With David Letterman, Radner revealed that she and other SNL writers often called Gillies while they were writing to get the character’s voice right — and then she phoned her old nanny, live on air, in the middle of the show. Gillies immediately told Radner, “I can’t hear you,” then described her dinner, and said Litella’s catchphrase, much to the audience’s delight.
4 Her love life was hilarious
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Though Radner’s love story with fellow comedic actor Gene Wilder is well known, before they married in 1984, Radner dated many men who would go on to become some of the most famous comedians in the world — including Martin Short, who she met during her job on Godspell in 1972. Short recalled, “She was four years older, so I was a little more naive. I was 22. She was more complex than I thought she was from initially meeting her. So that would lead to fights and that would lead to makeups. She had lots of psychological scarring from her childhood.”
After Short, Radner moved on, dating Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd and Harold Ramis. A childhood friend interviewed in the documentary Love, Gilda, observed that “Gilda used to say it was hard for her to see Ghostbusters, because every single guy in the movie had been her boyfriend at one time or another.” Before marrying Wilder, she was also married to guitarist G.E. Smith from 1980 to 1982 — though he only joined the SNL house band in 1985, several years after they split.
5 She and Gene Wilder made three films together — and they all flopped
Orion/courtesy Everett Collection
Radner said it was “love at first sight” when she met Wilder on the set of the 1982 film Hanky Panky, when she was still married to G.E. Smith. She and Wilder made a second movie together, the Wilder-written and -directed The Woman in Red, in 1984, at which point Radner’s divorce from Smith had been completed; she and Wilder married later that year. Their final collaboration, 1986’s Haunted Honeymoon, was also Radner’s final movie.
Though the films led to and deepened her relationship with Wilder, none of them reached the heights that either of them had achieved in other films and productions. Haunted Honeymoon was a particular failure, grossing $8 million on a $9 million budget. In her posthumously released 1989 memoir, It’s Always Something, Radner said of the film: “It was a bomb. One month of publicity and the movie was only in the theaters for a week – a box office disaster.”
6 She was open about her cancer battle
While shooting Haunted Honeymoon in 1985, Radner began to experience extreme pain in her legs, but struggled to get a clear explanation from the many doctors she consulted with. In October 1986, Radner was finally diagnosed with stage IV ovarian cancer; she immediately underwent surgery to remove a grapefruit-sized tumor, followed by radiation and chemotherapy.
After the National Enquirer wrote an article about her diagnosis that she said “had a devastating effect on my family and my friends,” Radner went public with her diagnosis. After she went into remission in 1988, she did interviews around her experience, making her among the first stars to speak openly about health issues to the public. She spoke more in-depth about her experience in her memoir.
While she had previously been given the all-clear, in late 1988, Radner found that her cancer had returned. On May 17, 1989, Radner was sedated before undergoing a CT scan; she never awoke, entering a coma that would end with her death on May 20.
Radner’s death happened to fall on a Saturday; Steve Martin was preparing to host the show. In honor of Radner, Martin tossed his opening monologue, and instead screened a skit he and Radner had done on SNL years earlier, called “Dancing in the Dark.” He concluded it by saying, “Gilda, we miss you.”
After Radner’s death, Wilder and Radner’s therapist opened Gilda’s Club, a free nonprofit support organization for people with cancer and their loved ones.
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