Lily Tomlin Biography Quotes 34 Report mistakes

Early Life and Education
Lily Tomlin was born Mary Jean Tomlin on September 1, 1939, in Detroit, Michigan, to parents Guy Tomlin and Lillie Mae (Ford) Tomlin, who had moved north from Kentucky. Raised in a working-class household on Detroit's east side, she developed an ear for voices and dialects that would later animate her comedic characters. Tomlin attended Cass Technical High School and began studying biology at Wayne State University before gravitating to theater and stand-up, drawn by campus productions and the ferment of Detroit's coffeehouse scene.

Emergence in Comedy
After early club work in Detroit and New York, Tomlin gained national notice with television variety appearances and then broke through on Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In in the late 1960s and early 1970s. On that show she introduced enduring characters including Ernestine, the tart-tongued, snorting telephone operator, and Edith Ann, a wry five-and-a-half-year-old truth-teller perched in an oversized rocking chair. Her precision timing, character work, and social satire distinguished her from more conventional setup-punchline comedians of the period.

Iconic Characters and Recording Career
Tomlin's character universe leapt from television to records and live performance. Her album This Is a Recording, built around Ernestine's antic calls to the powerful, topped the Billboard comedy chart and earned her a Grammy Award. She followed with And That's the Truth, amplifying Edith Ann's voice, and Modern Scream, a send-up of celebrity interviews. Tomlin also honed characters like Trudy, the bag lady philosopher, whose stream of insight and absurdity became a throughline in her later stage work.

Film Work
Robert Altman cast Tomlin in Nashville (1975) as Linnea Reese, a gospel-singing mother of two deaf children, a subtle, empathetic performance that earned her an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress. The Late Show (1977) paired her with Art Carney in a melancholic detective story. She became a staple of 1980s studio comedies: 9 to 5 (1980) with Jane Fonda and Dolly Parton, the satirical The Incredible Shrinking Woman (1981), All of Me (1984) opposite Steve Martin, and Big Business (1988) with Bette Midler. She returned to Altman for Short Cuts (1993) and later A Prairie Home Companion (2006), sharing scenes with Meryl Streep. Tomlin's appetite for offbeat ensembles continued with Flirting with Disaster (1996) for David O. Russell and I Heart Huckabees (2004), projects that let her mix deadpan humor with philosophical riffing. In Grandma (2015), directed by Paul Weitz and co-starring Julia Garner and Marcia Gay Harden, she anchored a small-scale, acerbic drama with a performance praised for its blend of prickliness and compassion.

Stage and Collaboration with Jane Wagner
A defining creative relationship began in the early 1970s when Tomlin reached out to writer-director Jane Wagner after seeing Wagner's television film J.T. Their partnership, personal and professional, reshaped Tomlin's work. Wagner wrote and directed the one-woman Broadway tour de force The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe (1985), in which Tomlin inhabited a gallery of characters with seamless detail; she won the Tony Award for Best Actress in a Play for the role. The two also created and refined stage pieces such as Appearing Nitely and sustained a decades-long collaboration in which Wagner's writing expanded the emotional and intellectual range of Tomlin's comedy.

Television and Voice Acting
Tomlin maintained a prolific television career across genres. She headlined acclaimed comedy specials in the 1970s, collaborating with artists like Richard Pryor, and later delivered a memorable recurring turn on The West Wing as Deborah Fiderer, the off-kilter but unflappable secretary to President Josiah Bartlet, sharing scenes with Martin Sheen and Allison Janney. She showed a flair for sitcom ensemble work in projects such as Malibu Country, opposite Reba McEntire.

As a voice actor, Tomlin became indelibly associated with Ms. Frizzle on the educational series The Magic School Bus, a role that earned her a Daytime Emmy and endeared her to a generation of young viewers. Decades later she voiced a wry, formidable Aunt May in the animated feature Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, introducing her to new audiences while demonstrating her range in animation.

Grace and Frankie and Later Career
Beginning in 2015, Tomlin co-starred with Jane Fonda in the Netflix series Grace and Frankie, playing an iconoclastic artist thrown into unexpected friendship when their husbands, portrayed by Martin Sheen and Sam Waterston, leave them for each other. The show's ensemble, which included June Diane Raphael, Brooklyn Decker, Ethan Embry, and Baron Vaughn, found a broad audience over seven seasons. Tomlin received multiple award nominations for the role, and the series became a touchstone for stories about aging, reinvention, and chosen family in contemporary television.

Honors and Recognition
Over the course of her career, Tomlin has earned numerous accolades across media, including multiple Primetime and Daytime Emmy Awards, a Grammy, and a Tony. She received the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor in 2003, recognizing her as a major figure in American comedy. In 2014 she was a Kennedy Center Honors recipient, and in 2017 she accepted the Screen Actors Guild Life Achievement Award, underscoring the esteem of her peers. These honors reflect the breadth of her contributions, from sketch and character comedy to film, theater, and voice work.

Personal Life and Advocacy
Tomlin and Jane Wagner have been partners since the early 1970s and married on December 31, 2013. Both have used their public platforms to support LGBTQ rights, women's equality, and social-justice causes. Tomlin's activism has also included advocacy for animal welfare; she narrated the HBO documentary An Apology to Elephants, aligning her celebrity with conservation efforts. Throughout her career she has approached politics and culture with a comedic lens that favors empathy over derision, often revealing the humanity beneath bureaucratic jargon, corporate doublespeak, and media hype.

Artistry and Legacy
Tomlin's comedy is rooted in character: meticulous voices, physical details, and behavioral tics that expose contradictions in American life. Whether as Ernestine swaggering behind the switchboard or as Trudy connecting cosmic insights to street-level observation, she balances satire with compassion. Directors such as Robert Altman recognized her dramatic instincts, while collaborators like Steve Martin, Bette Midler, and Meryl Streep found in Tomlin a scene partner both generous and unpredictable. Her partnership with Jane Wagner added literary depth and theatrical architecture to her gifts, resulting in a body of work that bridges stand-up, sketch, solo theater, television, and film.

Spanning from Detroit classrooms to Broadway spotlights and global streaming platforms, Lily Tomlin's career maps the evolution of American entertainment over six decades. She has remained curious, exacting, and adventurous, recasting herself while never abandoning the characters and concerns that first endeared her to audiences. In doing so, she has influenced generations of performers and writers, demonstrating that comedy can be intimate and expansive, pointed and humane, and that a singular voice can resonate across formats and eras.

Our collection contains 34 quotes who is written by Lily, under the main topics: Witty One-Liners - Motivational - Truth - Puns & Wordplay - Deep.

Other people realated to Lily: Garrison Keillor (Writer), Faith Ford (Actress)

• Lily Tomlin first husband: She has never had a husband; her spouse is Jane Wagner.
• Lily Tomlin and John Travolta relationship: They co-starred in Moment by Moment (1978); no off-screen romance, just colleagues.
• What is Lily Tomlin net worth? Public estimates are around $20 million (varies by source).
• Lily Tomlin songs: Known for comedy recordings: This Is a Recording (Grammy), And That's the Truth, Modern Scream; also did The Last Duet with Barry Manilow.
• Jane Wagner: Writer-director; Lily Tomlin's longtime collaborator and wife; wrote The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe.
• Lily Tomlin young: Born 1939 in Detroit; studied at Wayne State; early stand-up and improv; breakout on Laugh-In in the late 1960s.
• Lily Tomlin husband: She is married to writer-director Jane Wagner (wife); together since 1971, married in 2013.
• Lily Tomlin movies and TV shows: Films: Nashville; 9 to 5; The Incredible Shrinking Woman; All of Me; Big Business; I Heart Huckabees; A Prairie Home Companion; Grandma. TV: Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In; The Magic School Bus (Ms. Frizzle); The West Wing; Grace and Frankie.
• How old is Lily Tomlin? She is 86 years old

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