Rachel Dratch
Rachel Susan Dratch (born February 22, 1966) is an American actress and comedian. After she graduated from Dartmouth College, she moved to Chicago to study improvisational theatre at The Second City and ImprovOlympic. Dratch's breakthrough role was her tenure as a cast member on the NBC sketch comedy series Saturday Night Live from 1999 to 2006. During her time on SNL, she portrayed a variety of roles including Debbie Downer. She has since occasionally returned to SNL as a guest portraying Senator Amy Klobuchar.
Rachel Dratch
Actress and comedian
1994–present
1
Other television credits include The King of Queens, Monk, and 30 Rock. She has also played the recurring role of Wanda Jo Oliver on Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, acting in films including Click (2006), I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry (2007), Sisters (2015), and Wine Country (2019).
In 2022, Dratch made her Broadway stage debut in POTUS: Or, Behind Every Great Dumbass Are Seven Women Trying to Keep Him Alive for which she earned a Tony Award for Best Featured Actress in a Play nomination. In 2012 she published her autobiographical book Girl Walks into a Bar...: Comedy Calamities, Dating Disasters, and a Midlife Miracle.
Early life[edit]
Dratch was born on February 22, 1966, in Lexington, Massachusetts,[1][2] the daughter of Elaine Ruth (née Soloway), a transportation director, and Paul Dratch, a radiologist.[3][4] Both of Dratch's parents were Reform Jews.[5] Dratch attended Hebrew school and had a bat mitzvah. She is religiously nonobservant as an adult, and characterizes the faith she was born into as part of her cultural heritage.[2]
Her younger brother, Daniel, is a television producer and writer; his credits include the TV series Anger Management. Dratch says she grew up as the "class clown type"[2] attending William Diamond Middle School and Lexington High School in Lexington. She said while performing in high school plays she gravitated towards acting in comedies more often than in dramas.[6]
Dratch attended the National Theater Institute at the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center in the fall of 1985[7] and graduated from Dartmouth College in 1988. She majored in drama and psychology and was a member of the improvisational comedy group "Said and Done".[2] While at Dartmouth Dratch was a classmate of Kirsten Gillibrand.[8]
Personal life[edit]
In her book Girl Walks Into a Bar..., Dratch discusses meeting John Wahl, a consultant in the natural foods industry, in a bar in 2009. Six months later, Dratch learned she was pregnant, and on August 24, 2010, Dratch gave birth to Eli Benjamin, her son with Wahl.[18] In an October 2010 interview, Dratch told People that her pregnancy at age 44 shocked her because she "had bought into all this stuff about, 'Once you're over 40 [pregnancy becomes difficult]'" and had "gone through the whole process of letting go of [the idea of having kids]."[19] As of 2019, Dratch and Wahl are not a couple, but are on good terms and live near each other to parent their son.[20]