Lily Tomlin's snorting switchboard operator Ernestine made her a star and won a Grammy
One ringy dingy, two ringy dingy: Lily Tomlin's rude telephone operator Ernestine became a national catchphrase on Laugh-In. Tomlin went on to be the first solo woman to win the Grammy for comedy album, earned an Oscar nomination in her very first film, and six decades on was still starring opposite Jane Fonda.
Mary Jean Tomlin was born in Detroit on September 1, 1939, to Southern Baptist parents who had moved from Paducah, Kentucky, during the Depression; her father worked in a factory and her mother was a housewife and nurse's aide. She studied biology at Wayne State University until a play audition pulled her toward theatre. After college she worked the comedy clubs of Detroit and then New York, while taking acting classes.
Television found her in 1965 on The Merv Griffin Show. In 1969 she joined NBC's Laugh-In as a replacement cast member and was an instant hit, creating recurring characters she would carry into records and specials. Ernestine, contemporary but wearing a 1940s hairnet, treated callers with contempt and snorted at anything salacious; Tomlin has revived her for Sesame Street and even a campaign ad. The comedy album This Is a Recording won the Grammy in 1972, and her special Lily brought Emmys.
Her screen debut came in Robert Altman's Nashville in 1975, earning an Academy Award nomination for supporting actress, and The Late Show two years later won her the Silver Bear at Berlin. Her most celebrated stage work, a show about hunting for signs of intelligent life across the cosmos, was written by her partner, now wife, Jane Wagner, and won her the Tony for best actress on Broadway in 1985. On television she played a White House secretary in The West Wing and voiced Ms. Frizzle in The Magic School Bus.
Her pairing with Jane Fonda runs from 9 to 5 in 1980 through the Netflix series Grace and Frankie, which ran seven seasons to 2022 and brought four Emmy nominations, to two films together in 2023. Across her career she has collected seven Emmys, two Tonys, and two career tributes: Kennedy Center honours in 2014 and, three years later, the top lifetime prize from the Screen Actors Guild.
Source: Lily Tomlin
