Word: tomlin
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Lily is Lily Tomlin-of course. The reporter is Lily Tomlin-of course. And the chameleon is Lily Tomlin too. Indeed, if someone were to ask the real Lily Tomlin to stand up this week when she opens her one-woman show on Broadway, there would be either dead silence-or a forest of waving hands...
...Lily Tomlin, at age 37, the woman with the kaleidoscopic face, is just about that clever herself. She becomes the embodiment of Edith Ann, Lupe, Rick, Tess and a dozen or so others so quickly and flawlessly that she fools even the pros. "I don't think Tomlin really acts," says Robert Benton, who directed her in the year's sleeper film hit, The Late Show. "Her imagination is so vast that she just assumes the personality of the character...
...gracious hello." (Snort, snort.) "This is installation and repair service, Miss Tomlin speaking clearly into her mouthpiece. Who's calling, please. The A.M.A.? What's that stand for, Anna Maria Alberghetti? Oh, don't get so uptight. It's just a little joke. Not unlike Medicare...
...Tomlin picks up characters nearly everywhere. Sister Boogie Woman, for instance, was the idea of New York Novelist Cynthia Buchanan (Maiden). Crystal, the quadraplegic, stretches the limits of humor, but the notion came from a fan, the mother of a crippled child, who thought it would be "terrifically inspiring" for the handicapped if Lily did one of them. The woman even furnished one of Crystal's best lines: "At an amusement park a little kid asked me if I was a ride." Lupe, the world's oldest beautician, is modeled after the late Helena Rubinstein...
...Tomlin's characters reflect one or another of her chameleon shades. Some emerge straight out of a working-class background and her memories of growing up amid the plastic totems of the '50s. Indeed, everything about the '50s seems to have a kind of magic for her, and in conversation, as well as her act, she returns to those years, as if drawn by a magnet of nostalgia. Lily's family came from the Kentucky hill country, but like many impoverished Southerners, her parents moved north to Detroit during the Depression. She was born there...