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Gilda Susan Radner (June 28, 1946 – May 20, 1989) died 35 years ago today, at the age of 42. She was best remembered as an original cast member of the hit NBC sketch comedy show Saturday Night Live, for which she won an Emmy Award in 1978. In Ann Arbor, Radner began her broadcasting career as the weather girl for college radio station WCBN, but dropped out in her senior year to follow her then-boyfriend, a Canadian sculptor named Jeffrey Rubinoff, to Toronto, Canada. In Toronto, she made her professional acting debut in the 1972 production of Godspell with future stars Eugene Levy, Andrea Martin, Victor Garber, Martin Short, and Paul Shaffer. Afterward, Radner joined the Toronto Second City comedy troupe. Radner was a featured player on the National Lampoon Radio Hour, a comedy program syndicated to some 600 U.S. radio stations from 1974 to 1975. Fellow cast members included John Belushi, Richard Belzer, Chevy Chase, Bill Murray, Brian Doyle-Murray, and Rhonda Coullet. Radner gained name recognition as one of the original "Not Ready for Prime Time Players", the freshman group on the first season of Saturday Night Live. She was the first performer cast for the show. Between 1975 and 1980, she created characters such as obnoxious personal advice expert Roseanne Roseannadanna and "Baba Wawa", a parody of Barbara Walters. After Radner's death, Walters stated in an interview that Radner was the "first person to make fun of news anchors, now it's done all the time." She also played the character Emily Litella, an elderly hearing-impaired woman who gave angry and misinformed editorial replies on "Weekend Update". In addition, Radner parodied celebrities such as Lucille Ball, Patti Smith, and Olga Korbut in SNL sketches. She won an Emmy Award in 1978 for her work on SNL. Radner battled bulimia while on the show. She once told a reporter that she had thrown up in every toilet in Rockefeller Center. She had a relationship with SNL castmate Bill Murray, with whom she worked at the National Lampoon, and that ended badly. Few details of their relationship or its end were made public. When Radner wrote It's Always Something, this is the one reference she made of Murray in the entire book: "All the guys [in the National Lampoon group of writers and performers] liked to have me around because I would laugh at them till I peed in my pants and tears rolled out of my eyes. We worked together for a couple of years creating The National Lampoon Show, writing The National Lampoon Radio Hour, and even working on stuff for the magazine. Bill Murray joined the show and Richard Belzer ..." In 1979, incoming NBC President Fred Silverman offered Radner her own prime time variety show, which she turned down. That year, she was a host of the Music for UNICEF Concert at the United Nations General Assembly. Alan Zweibel, who co-created the Roseanne Roseannadanna character and co-wrote Roseanne's dialogue, recalled that Radner, one of three original SNL cast members who stayed away from cocaine, chastised him for abusing it. While in character as Roseannadanna, Radner gave the commencement address to the graduating class at the Columbia School of Journalism in 1979. Radner had mixed emotions about the fans and strangers who recognized her in public. She sometimes became "angry when she was approached, and upset when she wasn't. Radner met actor Gene Wilder on the set of the Sidney Poitier film Hanky Panky, when the two worked together making the film. She described their first meeting as "love at first sight." She was unable to resist her attraction to Wilder as her marriage to guitarist G. E. Smith deteriorated. Radner went on to make a second film, The Woman in Red, released in 1984 with Wilder and their relationship grew. The two were married on September 18, 1984, in St. Tropez. The pair made a third film together, Haunted Honeymoon, released in 1986. They remained married until her death in 1989. In September 1988, after tests showed no signs of cancer, Radner went on a maintenance chemotherapy treatment to prolong her remission, but three months later, in December, she learned the cancer had returned. She was admitted to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles on May 17, 1989 to undergo a CAT scan. She was given a sedative and went into a coma during the scan. She did not regain consciousness, and died three days later on May 20, 1989; Wilder was at her side. Her funeral was held in Connecticut on May 24, 1989. In lieu of flowers, her family requested that donations be sent to The Wellness Community. Her gravestone reads: "Gilda Radner Wilder - Comedienne - Ballerina 1946–1989". She was interred at Long Ridge Union Cemetery in Stamford, Connecticut. News of her death broke as Steve Martin was rehearsing to act as the guest host for that night's season finale of Saturday Night Live. The show's performers and crew, including Lorne Michaels, Phil Hartman, and Mike Myers (who had, in his own words, "fallen in love" with Radner after playing her son in a BC Hydro commercial on Canadian television and considered her the reason he wanted to be on SNL), had not known how grave her situation was. Martin's planned opening monologue was scrapped; in its place Martin, in tears, introduced a video clip of a 1978 sketch in which he and Radner had parodied Fred Astaire and Cyd Charisse in a well-known dance routine from The Band Wagon. After the clip Martin said it reminded him of "how great she was and of how young I looked. Gilda, we miss you."