# The First Cast *A Biography of Gilda Radner* — Legendary Biographies No. 019 - **Subject:** Gilda Susan Radner - **Written by:** Donovan Hadley - **Shelf:** Screen & Stage / Performing Arts - **Published:** 2026 - **Extent:** 189 pages, 6 × 9 in, 60# uncoated cream, black ink - **Paperback:** $19.99 — 6 × 9 in · 189 pp · 60# uncoated cream, black ink · perfect-bound paperback - **EPUB:** $3.99 — EPUB 3 · DRM-free · reads on Kindle, Kobo and Apple Books (ISBN 979-8-90623-057-7) - **Audiobook:** $5.99 — Unabridged · measured from the masters · read by Kennedy Lane (ISBN 979-8-90623-203-8) Buy it, or read the opening free: volumes/019-the-first-cast.html ## About this book She was Roseanne Roseannadanna, Emily Litella, Lisa Loopner, and Baba Wawa. She was the first cast member hired for Saturday Night Live in 1975, the first to win an Emmy, and the first to walk off the stage of Gilda Live on Broadway. She married Gene Wilder on September 18, 1984, and she died of ovarian cancer at fifty-two on May 20, 1989. Donovan Hadley's biography traces the arc from Detroit's Liggett School and Beverly Hills childhood through the early Second City years in Toronto, into the Lorne Michaels SNL fold where Gilda Susan Radner became, for five seasons, the most beloved performer of her generation. He follows her through the Gilda Live Broadway run, the marriage to Wilder, the 1986 ovarian-cancer diagnosis the doctors had missed for eighteen months, the experimental cisplatin regimen, and the founding — by Wilder, Joanna Bull, Joel Siegel, and Mandy Patinkin — of Gilda's Club in 1995. What emerges is a portrait of a comic actress whose entire performing register was vulnerability and whose entire offstage life was a fight with bodies — bulimic teen years, the long search for diagnosis, the cancer that took her before she could see what she had built. Hadley writes her with the warmth she earned and the institutional honesty her later years deserved. ## Contents 1. The Hotel on Livernois 2. Dibby 3. The Death of Herman Radner 4. Ann Arbor 5. Toronto 6. The Audition 7. Saturday Night 8. Emily Litella 9. Roseanne Roseannadanna 10. The Boys' Club 11. Gilda Live 12. The Wilderness 13. Gene 14. Something Is Wrong 15. The Diagnosis 16. The Wellness Community 17. It's Always Something 18. May 20, 1989 ## Questions **Who is The First Cast about?** Gilda Susan Radner. The title never carries the subject's name: it names one concrete thing out of the life — in this case The First Cast — and the name goes on the line underneath. **Is this an authorised biography?** No. No subject, estate, label or foundation had approval over the text, and none paid for a word of it. The cost of that independence is that no new interviews were conducted for the book; it is built from the public record, and it says on the page where a scene is reconstructed rather than documented. **Can I read some of it before buying?** Yes — the whole opening chapter and the writer's foreword, free and in full, with no email address and no account. That is 4,350 words of the book. **How long is it?** About 60,500 words, 18 chapters, 189 pages in the paperback. **What is the printed book like?** 6 × 9 in, 60# uncoated cream, black ink, perfect-bound paperback, matte laminate. Every title in the series uses the same specification, so they line up on a shelf. ## The writer Donovan Hadley is a Manchester-based culture writer for The Guardian and Sight & Sound. His biographies cover the film, theatre, and television figures whose work shaped the British and American midcentury. He spends his time researching archives to reconstruct the quiet moments behind major cultural milestones. His published work includes titles like The Nightmare Man, Frequency, and The Gap Year. He has also explored midcentury creative communities in books such as The Fifty Million Dollar Man, The USC Film School, Apartment Five C, Room 607, and The First Cast. He lives in Manchester, England, where he spends his weekends browsing local independent cinemas and collecting vintage film reels.