The Originals: Gilda Radner

For fans of the original "Saturday Night Live" cast, the visuals of Gilda Radner are real easy to call forth. The large, bushy hair of consumer reporter Roseanne Roseannadanna answering Mr. Richard Faber's letters. The little girl in the soup commercial. Little Emily Littella going on about "violins on television" instead of violence. That was enough to make her an Original. Her courage in the face of a killer, and her posthumous impact on cancer research, is what makes her a legend.

Born June 28, 1946 in Detroit, Michigan to Herman and Henrietta Radner, a prosperous brewing family, Gilda learned at an early age that life was tough. She had a distant, even somewhat competitive, relationship with her mother and lost her father, her inspiration to begin performing, at age 14 to brain cancer. Due to her mother's inability to handle Detroit winters, the family spent four months of every year in Florida, therefore she had no close child friends.

What she did have was the support of her father of her love of performing. He gave her dance lessons and took her to Broadway shows when they came to town. And she had inspiration for a future character from her governess, Elizabeth Clementine "Dibby" Gillies, who also gave her her first comedy lesson. Gilda, overweight as a child, had a defense because of Dibby, who told her to make the joke first, and laugh it off.

Dibby got a great tribute from Gilda: She was the inspiration for Emily Littella.

In an effort to build towards the dream of performing, she went to the University of Michigan and majored in drama, but she didn't graduate. Her route to stardom began in Toronto instead, where she moved with a boyfriend and landed a role in "Godspell." She joined the now-world-famous Second City troupe, which had some performers you may have heard of: Dan Aykroyd, John Belushi, and Bill Murray.

She came back stateside in 1973, performing in "The National Lampoon Show" off-Broadway with many of her Second City buddies, but it was a performance in Toronto that got the attention of Lorne Michaels, executive producer and creator of "Saturday Night Live."

Debuting October 1975, she was one of the original "Not Ready For Prime Time Players," was instrumental in getting Belushi onto the show by cajoling Michaels into taking a chance on him, and, of course, creating legendary characters (like Roseannadanna, Litella, and nerdy Lisa Loopner) and lines like "It's always something..." and "Never mind..." became calling cards.

She won an Emmy in 1978, had her own Broadway show in 1979 (meeting first husband G.E. Smith, the bandleader, in the process) and left SNL in 1980, ready to take over movies, appearing that year in Buck Henry's "First Family."

Fame brought on new battles. She dealt with bulimia, the result of the constant scrutiny of fame bringing on her old insecurities about appearance. And, while she clung to her SNL mates like a surrogate family, she wanted a real one of her own

Enter Gene Wilder.

In 1982, on the set of "Hanky Panky," Gilda met Wilder and called it "love at first sight." Later that year, Smith was out of the picture, and Gilda and Wilder married in the south of France in September 1984. They also made two more movies together, 1984's "The Woman In Red" and 1986's "Haunted Honeymoon."

Unfortunately, here's where fate stepped in to deal a harsh blow. Gilda was diagnosed with the ovarian cancer that would ultimately claim her life, in 1986. But the tough girl from Detroit wasn't going down without the disease knowing it was in a fight. Between bouts of chemo, Gilda wrote her autobiography, "It's Always Something," and came out, front and center, to promote cancer research.

And, yes, cancer won this round, as Gilda succumbed to it on May 20, 1989, at age 42, far too young.

But she's not done fighting, not by a long shot. Inspired by Gilda, Wilder, Joel Siegel, and Joanna Bull founded Gilda's Club, a now-worldwide organization that opened it's first Red Door in 1993 on West Houston Street in New York City. The Club provides no-charge meeting places for men, women and children fighting cancer to have that all-important support, both emotionally and socially, needed to fight this disease. On May 17, 2007 alone, the Club raised nearly $2 million in a gala fundraiser to aid in the battle.

So, she battled throughout her life, from a tough childhood, to breaking into showbiz, to give Jewish women the breakthrough they needed to make their impact, against bulimia, and finally against cancer, and never lost that smile, or the ability to make all of us laugh. "It's Always Something" when you can do that.