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Lily Tomlin, star of stage and screens big and little, finally has conquered radio. Or at least that's true in an ambling, circuitous fashion, as befitting a collaboration between Garrison Keillor and Robert Altman.
Tomlin forms a sister singing duo with Meryl Streep in a "A Prairie Home Companion," a backstage comedy-mystery-musical and all-around goof directed by Altman and written by Keillor based on his long-running radio variety show.
"Prairie Home Companion" is Tomlin's fourth appearance in an Altman film after "Nashville," "The Player" and "Short Cuts." She was nominated for a best supporting actress Oscar for her heart-rending work in "Nashville," playing a housewife conducting an affair with a singer played by Keith Carradine.
"She (Tomlin) works really hard," said Altman, speaking by telephone from New York. "She doesn't phone it in. ¿ Lily and Meryl and, I think Lindsay (Lohan), were rehearsing for two days before we started shooting, and as we were shooting, I'm sure they kept rehearsing."
A youthful 66, Tomlin is dressed in wealthy-bohemian style, with a chunky necklace complementing her flowing jacket and pants. As she speaks, she occasionally licks her top lip, evoking her most famous character, the snarky switchboard operator Ernestine.
In conversation, as on stage and screen, Tomlin is warm, gracious and good-naturedly mischievous qualities that allow her to play dragon ladies without ever seeming to truly spit fire.
Her "Prairie" character, Rhonda, is a smart-mouthed alpha sister to Streep's more naive Yolanda. It might have taken rehearsal time to perfect the dynamic, but Rhonda's Wisconsin accent was a breeze for Tomlin.
"The Detroit accent is not terribly far from Wisconsin," said Tomlin, reared in a Detroit apartment building and prone to Midwestern inflections when excited.
Having potential
Tomlin heard many regional cadences while growing up in Detroit during its industrial heyday.
"All these people came up from the South to work in the factories," said Tomlin, whose parents migrated from Kentucky. When young Mary Jean Tomlin was 8, a neighbor named Mrs. Rupert took her under her wing and taught her, among other things, that a lady crosses her legs only at the ankle, if at all.
"Mrs. Rupert had decided that I was the child (in the building) who had the most potential," Tomlin said with a smile. "I was a real tomboy, jumping off things, and then I would put on my lady veneer and go visit Mrs. Rupert."
Becoming a star
Mary Jean became Lily (after her mother, Lillie) once she got into show business. "Mary Tyler Moore was already a star, and I always loved my mother's name," Tomlin said. She started out doing stand-up comedy, first in Detroit and then in New York.
"I always did notebooks, or observations," Tomlin said. "Like one-liners, but observational: You know you've had too much to drink at a party when you hear them not saying things to you (that are) about you, like ¿Did she have a purse?'"
Tomlin refined those observations with writer Jane Wagner, her partner of 35 years. Their collaboration started with the 5-year-old, rocking-chair-dwarfed Edith Ann, who, like Ernestine, became a sensation on the NBC comedy hour "Laugh-In." The hit show represented Tomlin's big break, but she always thought bigger.
"It never occurred to me that I couldn't be in other media," Tomlin said.
Tomlin carved out a movie career with two critical hits ("Nashville" and "The Late Show," with Art Carney) offset by a spectacular miss ("Moment by Moment," with John Travolta) in the 1970s. In the 1980s, a time when Hollywood still made big-budget comedies starring middle-aged women, she scored a box office hit with "9 to 5" (with Jane Fonda and Dolly Parton) and more modest successes with "All of Me," co-starring Steve Martin, and "Big Business," with Bette Midler.
In recent years, she returned to her "Nashville" roots by working with a latter-day maverick director, David O. Russell, on "Flirting With Disaster" and "I (Heart) Huckabees."
"I don't think I'm a movie star," Tomlin said. "I'm a star who's in movies."
Diversifying roles
She has maintained a consistently high profile for more than three decades by diversifying. Over the past decade or so, she has alternated recurring roles on "Murphy Brown" and "The West Wing" with regular appearances on stages across the country. A 2000 revival of Tomlin and Wagner's "The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe" played on Broadway and across the country.
Tomlin recently reunited with Fonda and Parton to mark the 25th anniversary and a new DVD release of "9 to 5."
Unlike her co-stars from that film, Tomlin doesn't plan on writing a memoir. It sounds too final.
She prefers characters to frame experiences, citing an old monologue, "Tell Miss Sweeney Goodbye," about a second-grader with a crush on her teacher.
"The kid gets all maudlin and fantasizes about throwing herself in front of a bus, and then Miss Sweeney will regret that she neglected her," Tomlin said, still tickled by the concept.
These stories "just become glorious pieces to me, and they tell (experiences) in a more metaphorical, universal way."
Kind of the way a pompadoured 1940s hairdo and a snort are universal symbols of corporate arrogance.
"At the premiere in St. Paul, a woman came over and says, ¿You'll always be Ernestine to me!'" Tomlin said. "I always say that they'll run Ernestine's picture with my obituary. They won't run mine."
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