Lily Tomlin

American actress, comedian, writer, singer, and producer who started her career in stand-up comedy and sketch comedy before transitioning her career to acting across stage and screen. In a career spanning over fifty years, Tomlin has received numerous accolades, including seven Emmy Awards, a Grammy Award, two Tony Awards, and a nomination for an Academy Award.

Tomlin started working at the age of 14 in a dime-store to supplement the family income. She started out as a med student at Wayne State University, dropping out to do cabaret as a local performer. By 1966, she relocated to New York doing coffee house comedy, commercials and appearing regularly on The Garry Moore Show.

After that show folded, she went back to cabaret for nearly three years and joined the cast of Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In in December 1969. Her popularity grew with the character impersonations of "Ernestine" (a brash, tough and uncompromising telephone operator) and "Edith Ann" (a precocious five-and-a-half-year-old girl), which established her as a masterful entertainer, able to disappear into her character at a moment's notice.

Tomlin was one of the first female comedians to break out in male drag with her characters Tommy Velour and Rick. In 1982, but later popularized by a Saturday Night Live appearance on 22 January 1983, she premiered Purvis Hawkins, a black rhythm-and-blues soul singer (patterned after Luther Vandross), with a moustache, beard, and close-cropped afro hairstyle, dressed in a three-piece suit. Tomlin used very little, if any, skin-darkening cosmetics as part of the character, instead depending on stage lighting to create the effect.

Tomlin released her first comedy album, This Is A Recording, on Polydor Records in March 1971 that contained Ernestine's run-ins with customers over the phone. The album hit No. 15 on the Billboard Hot 200, becoming (and remaining as of 2011) the highest-charting album ever by a solo comedienne.