Gilda Radner, the Emmy Award-winning comedian who created the nasal-voiced broadcaster Roseanne Roseannadanna, the nerdy teenager Lisa Loopner and the bumbling complainer Emily Litella for the television show "Saturday Night Live," died of cancer early Saturday at a hospital in Los Angeles.
She was 42. "There's a preciseness to her parody," the critic Molly Haskell once said of Miss Radner. "Like Dickens, she's added people to the world who bear her stamp. And even when she's tasteless, you don't wince. There's something very gentle and sweet in Gilda that comes through."As a guest editorialist on the "Satur-day Night Live" parody of the weekend news, Radner would rail against broadcasters for paying too much attention to "endangered feces."
And only when it was made clear to her that the subject was "endangered species" would she back off, mewling, "Never mind."
Besides her standard "Never mind," Radner coined the catch phrase for the scatterbrained Roseanne Roseannadanna, "It's always something," which became the title of a book she wrote detailing her fight with ovarian cancer.
Radner, whose illness was diagnosed two and a half years ago, died in her sleep about 6:20 a.m. at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, a hospital spokesman, Ron Wise, said. Her husband of five years, the actor and filmmaker Gene Wilder, was at her side.
"I loved her like a sister," a fellow "Saturday Night" star, Dan Aykroyd, said in comments relayed by a spokeswoman, Susan Patricola. "My thoughts are with Gene and her family." Radner, who won the Emmy as the outstanding actress in a variety series, was reared in a quasi-theatrical family in Detroit.
"My father had a hotel," she once told an interviewer, "and people in show business used to stay there. He loved peformers and entertainment, and I grew up knowing that. Some of his spunk must have come out in me, because he used to love to perform, too. He was funny, he could tell a good story, he could do magic tricks."
After "Saturday Night Live," she appeared in several films, including "First Family," "The Woman in Red," a 1984 hit written and directed by her co-star and future husband, Wilder.