The answer to “do you ever forget who you’ve covered?” is yes. My calendar for today has Rhea Perlman on it, because I forgot I’d written about her almost exactly seven years ago and neglected to look her up. (I do have an answer to the question of whether or not she can actually act that I’d asked in it; she plays a character in Barbie who isn’t just Carla.) I waffled for a while between writing about her sister Heide and writing about Shelley Long. Then I realized that the objectively correct answer was to write about Bebe Neuwirth, and not just because, if I were a character from Cheers, it’s most likely that I would be Lilith.
Young Beatrice Jane Neuwirth originally wanted to be a ballerina. She’d seen The Nutcracker and was hooked. That was at age five. At age thirteen, she saw Pippin and changed her mind. She wanted to dance on Broadway. And she was clearly good—she was good enough to get into Julliard. She then dropped out, because she thought it was too oppressive and didn’t teach enough Broadway-style dance. Instead, she got her training at a YWCA—but it was a heck of a Y, because she trained under Joan Morton Lucas, who had quite the career of her own.
In 1980, she made her Broadway debut in A Chorus Line. Obviously not the original cast; the show did go on for a while, after all. In 1986, she got a Tony for a revival of Sweet Charity. She wasn’t particularly interested in doing TV work, but she auditioned for a one-shot role on an episode of Cheers. She wasn’t planning to take off the way she did, but honestly she did because she was Bebe Neuwirth, not because she was Lilith. Lilith played by a lot of actresses would have stayed a one-shot. Lilith played by Neuwirth became an icon.
Apparently she prefers Broadway anyway. She’ll still play Lilith. She has done movies; I’ve always kind of wondered if her character in Say Anything . . . had a crush on Lloyd. Yes, she’s a teacher, and no, I don’t think she’d do anything along those lines, but I think there’s a clear attraction there. In 1996, she was in a pilot that wasn’t picked up but was edited and released as a short film and won the Best Live Action Short Oscar, the only time that’s happened for a failed TV show, apparently.
I’d love to have seen her as Velma Kelly. Apparently she considers it about the hardest thing she’d ever done, comparing it to performing microsurgery for the length of the show. She is also a cat person, so now I’m picturing her coming home exhausted and probably in pain—she’s had two hip replacements and runs a charity to help dancers in similar situations—and snuggling with her kitties. Yes, that’s my imagination, but it’s heartwarming as hell, so I’m keeping it in. Because yay kitties and yay Bebe Neuwirth.
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