- published: 14 Feb 2015
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Lorne Michaels, CM (born November 17, 1944) is a Canadian-Americantelevision producer, writer, and comedian best known for creating and producing Saturday Night Live and producing the various film and TV projects that spun off from it.
Michaels was born Lorne David Lipowitz in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, the son of Florence (née Becker) and Henry Abraham Lipowitz, a furrier. He was the eldest of the Lipowitz children. He has a sister, Barbara Lipowitz, who currently resides in Toronto, and a brother, Mark Lipowitz, who died from a brain tumor. Michaels attended the Forest Hill Collegiate Institute in Toronto and graduated from University College, University of Toronto, where he majored in English, in 1966. Michaels began his career as a writer and broadcaster for CBC Radio. He moved to Los Angeles from Toronto in 1968 to work as a writer for Laugh-In and The Beautiful Phyllis Diller Show. He starred with Hart Pomerantz in The Hart and Lorne Terrific Hour, a Canadian comedy series which ran briefly in the early 1970s. During the late 1960s, Michaels married Rosie Shuster, who later worked with him on Saturday Night Live as a writer. She was the daughter of Frank Shuster, one half of the famous comedy team, Wayne and Shuster. Michaels and Shuster were divorced in 1980.
John William "Will" Ferrell (/ˈfɛrəl/; born July 16, 1967) is an American comedian, impressionist, actor, and writer. Ferrell first established himself in the mid 1990s as a cast member on the NBC sketch comedy show Saturday Night Live, and has subsequently starred in the comedy films Old School, Elf, Anchorman, Talladega Nights, Stranger than Fiction, Blades of Glory, Semi-Pro, and The Other Guys. He is considered a member of the "Frat Pack", a generation of leading Hollywood comic actors who emerged in the late 1990s and the 2000s, including Jack Black, Ben Stiller, Steve Carell, Vince Vaughn, and brothers Owen and Luke Wilson.
Ferrell was born in Irvine, California, the son of Betty Kay (née Overman), a teacher who taught at Old Mill School elementary school and Santa Ana College, and Roy Lee Ferrell, Jr., a musician with The Righteous Brothers. His parents were both natives of Roanoke Rapids, North Carolina, and moved to California in 1964; Ferrell has Irish ancestry. Ferrell has a younger brother, Patrick. When he was 8, his parents divorced. Ferrell said of the divorce, "I was the type of kid who would say, 'Hey Look at the bright side! We'll have two Christmases.'" The divorce was amicable and both parents were committed to their children. The biggest problem was Lee's line of work. As a person in show business, his paychecks were never steady and he was gone from home months at a time. Growing up in the environment made Ferrell not want to go into show business, but get a steady job.
Elizabeth Stamatina "Tina" Fey ( /ˈfeɪ/; born May 18, 1970) is an American actress, comedian, writer and producer, known for her work on the NBC sketch comedy series Saturday Night Live (SNL), the NBC comedy series 30 Rock, and films such as Mean Girls (2004) and Baby Mama (2008).
Fey first broke into comedy as a featured player in the Chicago-based improvisational comedy group The Second City. She then joined SNL as a writer, later becoming head writer and a performer, known for her position as co-anchor in the Weekend Update segment. In 2004 she adapted the screenplay Mean Girls in which she also co-starred. After leaving SNL in 2006, she created the television series 30 Rock, a situation comedy loosely based on her experiences at SNL. In the series, Fey portrays the head writer of a fictional sketch comedy series. In 2008, she starred in the comedy film Baby Mama, alongside former SNL co-star Amy Poehler. Fey next appeared in the 2010 comedy films Date Night and Megamind.
She has received seven Emmy Awards, three Golden Globe Awards, four Screen Actors Guild Awards, four Writers Guild of America Awards and has been nominated for a Grammy Award for her autobiographical book Bossypants, which topped the The New York Times Best Seller list for five weeks. She was singled out as the performer who had the greatest impact on culture and entertainment in 2008 by the Associated Press, which gave her its AP Entertainer of the Year award for her satirical portrayal of Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin in a guest appearance on SNL. In 2010, Fey was the recipient of the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor, the youngest-ever winner of the award.
Actors: Jess Platt (miscellaneous crew), Rick Parker (miscellaneous crew), Michael Jaffe (producer), Gilda Radner (writer), Merv Griffin (producer), Lynn Josephson Delaney (miscellaneous crew), Paul Dixon (editor), Marcia Bennett (actress), Ernest Chambers (producer), Howard Braunstein (producer), Karen Robinson (actress), Gilda Radner (actress), George Wyner (actor), Jane Luk (actress), Pamela Hackwell (miscellaneous crew),
Plot: The story of comedienne 'Gilda Radner' (qv), based on her autobiography. Covered are her years as part of the original cast of _"Saturday Night Live" (1975)_ (qv), her marriage to actor/director 'Gene Wilder' (qv) and her battle with ovarian cancer, to which she succumbed in 1989.
Keywords: based-on-book, character-name-in-title, television