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Read the opening free
4,350 words · no email, no account
No. 019 · Screen & Stage · Performing Arts
The First Cast
a biography of Gilda Susan Radner
What the book is
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.
At a glance
- Subject
- Gilda Susan Radner
- Shelf
- Screen & Stage · Performing Arts
- Written by
- Donovan Hadley
- Chapters
- 18 across 189 pages
- Narrated by
- Kennedy Lane
- Editions
- Paperback · EPUB · Audiobook
- Authorisation
- Unauthorised — no subject, estate or label had approval over the text.
Contents · 18 chapters
- 01The Hotel on LivernoisRead free
- 02Dibby3,450 words
- 03The Death of Herman Radner2,902 words
- 04Ann Arbor3,083 words
- 05Toronto3,015 words
- 06The Audition3,442 words
- 07Saturday Night2,964 words
- 08Emily Litella2,908 words
- 09Roseanne Roseannadanna3,101 words
- 10The Boys' Club3,382 words
- 11Gilda Live3,024 words
- 12The Wilderness3,400 words
- 13Gene3,180 words
- 14Something Is Wrong3,230 words
- 15The Diagnosis3,216 words
- 16The Wellness Community3,260 words
- 17It's Always Something2,803 words
- 18May 20, 19895,350 words
The opening chapter is published in full — read it here.
Editions
- 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
The printed edition has no ISBN registered yet. It affects library and retail listing, not your order.
Questions
01Who 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.
02Is 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.
03Can 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.
04How long is it?
About 60,500 words, 18 chapters, 189 pages in the paperback.
05What 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.
