I feel like I have a very sober perspective on all of it.”įor the people who want to hear about the crazy, cocaine-fueled days and nights of “Saturday Night Live,” Newman devotes a big chunk of her memoir to an unflinching, but still affectionate look at the high-wire show that vaulted the unknown cast into the oxygen-depleted entertainment stratosphere. “There are times when I’m either a cultural icon, or I’m being shoved aside so that someone can get a photo of someone else on the red carpet. “Honestly, it can be very daunting because people think I’m not working anymore,” Newman said. Since leaving the show all of those decades ago, Newman has amassed voice-acting credits on hundreds of episodes of such animated favorites as “SpongeBob SquarePants,” “American Dad!” and “Doc McStuffins.” While she has never stopped working and learning, Newman has also never gotten used to the fact that people assume her professional life ended more than 40 years ago. It was only five years, but like everyone else in the show’s pioneering cast, Newman has had a hard time getting out from under its massive zeitgeist shadow. Newman was with “SNL” through 1980, playing such iconic characters as Connie Conehead and Sherry, one of television’s first Valley Girls. There was really no advantage to being so young then.” It would have been better if I had been more developed as a performer and more mature. ![]() “The cons had to do with not having enough experience under my belt to have the confidence I needed. “The pro of being so young then is that I didn’t know what I didn’t know,” Newman said during a phone interview from her home in Century City. The influential improv company launched when Newman was just 20.Īfter seeing her perform with the Groundlings, producer Lorne Michaels cast Newman in 1975’s “The Lily Tomlin Special.” Later that year, Michaels recruited her to join Dan Aykroyd, John Belushi, Chevy Chase, Jane Curtin, Garrett Morris and Gilda Radner for the late-night experiment that became “Saturday Night Live.”Īt the not-advanced age of 23, Newman was given the gig that would define her. Upon returning to Los Angeles, Newman (along with older sister, Tracy) became one of the co-founders of the Groundlings. ![]() After graduating from high school, she went to Paris to study with master mime Marcel Marceau for a year. At the impressionable age of 4, she got the studio audience to laugh while bantering with TV host Art Linkletter, and she was marked for life. Which is not to say Laraine Newman hasn’t been lucky.īorn and raised in Los Angeles, Newman caught the showbiz bug early.
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