Gilda Radner

Early life[edit]

Radner was born in Detroit, Michigan, to Jewish parents, Henrietta (née Dworkin), a legal secretary, and Herman Radner, a businessman.^[1][2] In Radner's autobiography she stated, “I was named after my grandmother whose name began with G, but 'Gilda' came directly from the movie with Glenn Ford and Rita Hayworth.”^[3] Through her mother, Radner was a second cousin of business executive Steve Ballmer.^[4] She grew up in Detroit with a nanny, Elizabeth Clementine Gillies, whom she called "Dibby" (and on whom she based her famous character Emily Litella),^[5] and an older brother, Michael. She attended the exclusive University Liggett School in Detroit.


Toward the end of her life, Radner wrote in her autobiography, It's Always Something, that during her childhood and young adulthood she had battled numerous eating disorders: "I coped with stress by having every possible eating disorder from the time I was nine years old. I have weighed as much as 160 pounds and as little as 93. When I was a kid, I overate constantly. My weight distressed my mother and she took me to a doctor who put me on Dexedrine diet pills when I was ten years old."^[6]


Radner was close to her father, who operated Detroit's Seville Hotel, where many nightclub performers and actors stayed while performing in the city.^[7] He took her on trips to New York to see Broadway shows.^[8] As Radner wrote in It's Always Something, when she was 12, her father developed a brain tumor. The first symptoms came on suddenly: he told people that his glasses were too tight.^[9] Within days, he was bedridden and unable to communicate, and remained in that condition until his death two years later.^[9]


In 1964, Radner graduated from Liggett and enrolled at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor,^[10] where she planned to get a degree in education.^[11]