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Lily Tomlin is a Actor and Producer American born on 1 september 1939 at Detroit (USA)

Lily Tomlin

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Birth name Mary Jean Tomlin
Nationality USA
Birth 1 september 1939 (84 years) at Detroit (USA)
Awards Primetime Emmy Award

Mary Jean "Lily" Tomlin (born September 1, 1939) is an American actress, comedian, writer, singer, and producer.

Tomlin began her career as a stand-up comedian, and performing Off-Broadway during the 1960s. Her breakout role was performing as a cast member on the variety show Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In from 1970 until 1973. She currently stars on the Netflix series Grace and Frankie as Frankie Bergstein. Her performance as Frankie garnered her a nomination for the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Comedy Series in 2015.

In 1974 Tomlin was cast by Robert Altman in her first film; her performance as Linnea Reese in Nashville won her several awards and nominations for the Golden Globe and Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress.

In 1977, her performance as Margo Sperling in The Late Show won her the Best Actress Award at the Berlin International Film Festival and nominations for the Golden Globe and BAFTA Award for Best Lead Actress. Her other notable films include 9 to 5 (1980), All of Me (1984), Flirting with Disaster (1996), Tea with Mussolini (1999), I Heart Huckabees (2004), and A Prairie Home Companion (2006) and Grandma (2015).

Her signature role was written by her wife, Jane Wagner, in a show titled The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe which opened on Broadway in 1985 and won Tomlin the Tony Award for Best Lead Actress in a Play. She is also known as the voice of Ms. Frizzle on the children's series The Magic School Bus. She won her first Emmy Awards in 1974 for writing and producing her own television special, Lily. Tomlin won a Grammy Award for her 1972 comedy album This Is a Recording. In 2014 she was given Kennedy Center Honors.

Biography

Tomlin met Jane Wagner in March 1971. After watching the after-school TV special "J.T." written by Wagner, Tomlin invited Wagner to Los Angeles to collaborate on Tomlin's comedy LP record album And That's The Truth. The couple had no formal coming out. Tomlin said in 2006:

I certainly never called a press conference or anything like that. [Back in the '70s,] people didn't write about it. Even if they knew, they would [refer to Jane as] "Lily's collaborator," things like that. Some journalists are just motivated by their own sense of what they want to say or what they feel comfortable saying or writing about. In '77, I was on the cover of Time. The same week I had a big story in Newsweek. In one of the magazines it says I live alone, and the other magazine said I live with Jane Wagner. Unless you were so really adamantly out, and had made some declaration at some press conference, people back then didn't write about your relationship. ... In '75 I was making the Modern Scream album, and Jane and I were in the studio. My publicist called me and said, "Time will give you the cover if you'll come out." I was more offended than anything that they thought we'd make a deal. But that was '75—it would have been a hard thing to do at that time.

Tomlin stated in 2008, "Everybody in the industry was certainly aware of my sexuality and of Jane...in interviews I always reference Jane and talk about Jane, but they don't always write about it."

Tomlin has been involved in a number of feminist and gay-friendly film productions, and on her 1975 album Modern Scream she pokes fun at straight actors who make a point of distancing themselves from their gay and lesbian characters—answering the pseudo-interview question, she replies: "How did it feel to play a heterosexual? I've seen these women all my life, I know how they walk, I know how they talk..."

In 2013, Lily Tomlin and Jane Wagner worked together on the film An Apology to Elephants, which Jane wrote and Lily narrated.