A comedic genius, but still just a girl
Love, Gilda★★★ (out of 4) Documentary on the life, career and ambitions of Saturday Night Live funny lady Gilda Radner. Directed by Lisa D’Apolito. Opens Friday at Ted Rogers Cinema. 88 minutes. STC
Gilda Radner had a host of characters she performed on Saturday Night Live, the late-night TV show that made her famous.
As Lisa D’Apolito’s documentary Love, Gilda shows, the funny lady also had varied responses to that fame, which both enraptured and repelled her.
Radner, who died from ovarian cancer in 1989 at the age of 42, grew up in Detroit thinking of herself as homely and fat (she had a lifelong struggle with eating disorders), yet secure in the knowledge that she could make people laugh with her many, often self-deprecating, characters. In her SNL years, they included such popular creations as language-mangling senior Emily Litella and sassy Latina Roseanne Roseannadanna.
Her brief life included an Emmy win, a hit one-woman show on Broadway and a posthumous Grammy. She also starred in several Hollywood comedies.
Yet at heart, Radner longed just to be accepted and adored as a regular person.
“My main priority is to be a girl,” she writes in her abundant diary notes, revealed in Love,
Gilda. “I never wanted to be anything else.”
But her talent at making people laugh would insist on making her a star, right when she first grabbed public attention as part of the Godspell troupe in Toronto, where she would meet Martin Short, a future SNL player and briefly a romantic partner.
Radner was the first cast member hired by SNL producer Lorne Michaels for his counterculture TV show. She was arguably the most beloved member of The Not Ready For Prime Time Players during their fiveyear reign on SNL from 1975 to 1980.
Love, Gilda credits her with being the first person to utter the word “bitch” on network TV without being censored, a tribute both to Radner and the popularity of her daffy Litella character, whom she based on her adored childhood nanny.
She’s also apparently the first person to talk openly on network TV about having cancer, which she did on her friend Garry Shandling’s show, a few months before her death.
She managed to make fun of a very bad situation, also doing so in her autobiography It’s Always Something, titled for a Roseanne Roseannadanna catch phrase.
“My biggest motivation has always been love,” Radner wrote in another of her diary entries. The feeling comes through in Love, Gilda, prompting us to return it in kind.