Carol Burnett

Early life and education

Carol Creighton Burnett was born on April 26, 1933, at Nix Hospital in San Antonio, Texas, the daughter of Ina Louise (née Creighton), a publicity writer for movie studios, and Joseph Thomas Burnett, a movie theater manager. She was named after Carole Lombard. Her maternal grandparents were William Henry Creighton (1873–1918) and Mabel Eudora "Mae" Jones (1885–1967). Her parents divorced in the late 1930s. Subsequently, both parents independently moved to Hollywood and Burnett moved with her grandmother to a one-room apartment near her mother. They lived in an impoverished area of Hollywood, California, in a boarding house with Burnett's younger half-sister Chrissie.

When Burnett was in second grade, she briefly invented an imaginary twin sister named Karen, with Shirley Temple-like dimples. She later recalled that, motivated to further the pretense, she "fooled the other boarders in the rooming house where we lived by frantically switching clothes and dashing in and out of the house by the fire escape and the front door. Then I became exhausted and Karen mysteriously vanished." When Burnett was nine, she taught herself how to do the "Tarzan yell", which she realized years later was a good vocal exercise for volume, and it became a fan favorite. Burnett's first experiences with singing were with her family. Her grandmother was a trained musician who could play the piano (although they did not have one at the time), and her mother played the ukulele, so they sometimes sang popular songs in harmony together around the kitchen table. Her grandmother frequently took Burnett and her sister to the movies. They would take a few rolls of toilet paper home from the theater. The movies she saw in her youth influenced the sketch content in The Carol Burnett Show.

Burnett worked as an usherette at the Warner Brothers Theater (now the Hollywood Pacific Theatre). When the cinema screened Alfred Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train (1951), having already seen and enjoyed the film, she advised two patrons arriving during the last five minutes of a showing to wait until the beginning of the next showing to avoid spoiling the ending for them, but the couple insisted on being seated. The manager observed Burnett not letting the couple in and fired her, stripping the epaulettes from her uniform on the spot. Years later in the 1970s after achieving TV stardom, when the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce offered her a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, they asked her where she wanted it. She replied "Right in front of where the old Warner Brothers Theater was, at Hollywood and Wilcox", which is where it was placed, at 6439 Hollywood Blvd.

Career

1955–1966: Rise to prominence

Burnett spent her first year in New York working as a hat-check girl and trying to land acting jobs. She and other girls living at the Rehearsal Club (a boarding house for women seriously pursuing acting careers) put on The Rehearsal Club Revue on March 3, 1955. They mailed invitations to agents, who showed up along with stars like Celeste Holm and Marlene Dietrich. Such attendance opened doors for several of the girls.

Burnett was cast in a minor role on The Paul Winchell and Jerry Mahoney Show in 1955. She played the girlfriend of a ventriloquist's dummy on the popular children's program. This role led to her starring role opposite Buddy Hackett in the short-lived sitcom Stanley from 1956 to 1957.

After Stanley, Burnett found herself unemployed for a short time. A few months later she bounced back, becoming highly popular as a performer on the New York circuit of cabarets and night clubs, most notably for a hit parody number called "I Made a Fool of Myself Over John Foster Dulles" (Dulles was Secretary of State at the time). In 1957, she performed this number on both The Tonight Show and The Ed Sullivan Show. Dulles was asked about her on Meet the Press and joked, "I never discuss matters of the heart in public."

Around this time she also worked as a regular on one of television's earliest game shows, Pantomime Quiz. On January 10, 1958, just as she was achieving her first small successes, her mother died. In October 1960, Burnett debuted at New York City's Blue Angel Supper Club, where she was discovered by scouts for The Jack Paar Show and The Ed Sullivan Show.

Burnett's first true taste of success came with her appearance on Broadway in the 1959 musical Once Upon a Mattress, for which she was nominated for a Tony Award; in the same year, she paid back her mysterious benefactor "to the day" after agreeing to her non-obligatory unsecured loan of $1,000. The same year, she became a regular player on The Garry Moore Show, a job that lasted until 1962. She won an Emmy Award that year for her "Outstanding Performance in a Variety or Musical Program or Series" on the show. She portrayed a number of characters, most memorably the put-upon cleaning woman. The character later became her signature alter-ego. With her success on the Moore Show, Burnett finally rose to headliner status and appeared in the special Julie and Carol at Carnegie Hall (1962), co-starring with her friend Julie Andrews. The show was produced by Bob Banner, directed by Joe Hamilton and written by Mike Nichols and Ken Welch. Julie and Carol at Carnegie Hall won an Emmy Award for Outstanding Program Achievement in the Field of Music, and Burnett won an Emmy for her performance. She also guest-starred on a number of shows during this time, including The Twilight Zone episode "Cavender Is Coming". In July 1963 Burnett starred as Calamity Jane in the Dallas State Fair Musicals production of Calamity Jane and had her television special debut in 1963 when CBS aired that production on November 12, 1963.

1967–1978: The Carol Burnett Show

In 1967, after CBS offered Burnett Here's Agnes, she exercised a stipulation in her ten-year contract with CBS that said she had five years from the date The Garry Moore Show ended to "push the button" on hosting thirty one-hour episodes of a music/comedy variety show. As a result, the hour-long Carol Burnett Show was born and debuted in September 1967, eventually garnering 23 Emmy Awards and winning or being nominated for multiple Emmy and Golden Globe Awards every season it was on the air. Its ensemble cast included Tim Conway (who was a guest player until the ninth season), Harvey Korman, Lyle Waggoner and the teenaged Vicki Lawrence, whom Burnett discovered and mentored. The network initially did not want her to do a variety show because it believed only men could be successful at variety, but her contract required that it give her one season of whatever kind of show she wanted to make. She chose to carry on the tradition of past variety show successes. During this time Burnett was the first celebrity to appear on the children's series Sesame Street, appearing on that series' first episode on November 10, 1969. She also made occasional returns to the stage in the 1970s and 1980s. In 1974, she appeared at the Muny Theatre in St. Louis, Missouri, in I Do! I Do! with Rock Hudson.

A true variety show, The Carol Burnett Show struck a chord with viewers. Among other subjects, it parodied films (Went with the Wind! for Gone with the Wind), television (As the Stomach Turns for the soap opera As the World Turns) and commercials. There were also frequent musical numbers. Burnett and her team struck gold with the original sketch "The Family", which eventually was spun off into the television show Mama's Family, starring Vicki Lawrence. She opened most shows with an impromptu question-and-answer session with the audience, lasting a few minutes, during which she often demonstrated her ability to humorously ad lib. On numerous occasions, she obliged when asked to perform her trademark Tarzan yell. She ended each show by tugging on her left ear, which was a message to her grandmother. This was done to let her know that she was doing well and that she loved her. During the show's run, her grandmother died. On an Intimate Portrait episode about Burnett, she tearfully recalled her grandmother's last moments: "She said to my husband Joe from her hospital bed 'Joe, you see that spider up there?' There was no spider, but Joe said he did anyhow. She said 'Every few minutes a big spider jumps on that little spider and they go at it like rabbits!!' And then she died. There's laughter in everything!" Burnett continued the tradition of tugging her ear.

The show ceased production in 1978. Four post-script episodes were produced and aired on ABC during the summer of 1979 under the title Carol Burnett & Company. The productions used essentially the same format and, with the exception of Harvey Korman and Lyle Waggoner, the same supporting cast. Beginning in 1977, the comedy sketches of her series were edited into half-hour episodes for syndication entitled Carol Burnett and Friends, which for many years proved to be extremely popular in syndication. In the digital age, the series began airing on MeTV in January 2015. Burnett starred in a few films while her variety show was running, including Pete 'n' Tillie (1972) and The Front Page (1974). She was nominated for an Emmy in 1974 for her role in the drama 6 Rms Riv Vu. The show's enduring popularity surprised many when a 2001 retrospective containing outtakes and discussions with the cast, and a tribute to Bob Mackie, who designed all of the costumes that appeared on the show and enhanced outfits with comedic touches, drew in 30 million viewers, topping the Emmy Awards as well as all but the final game of that year's World Series. Her Grammy-winning memoir In Such Good Company is about the show, and Burnett tells about how it was developed, with anecdotes about improvisations, the cast, crew, and guests.

1979–1999: Film roles and return to Broadway

After her show ended, she assumed a number of roles that departed from comedy. She appeared in several dramatic roles, most notably in the television movie Friendly Fire. She appeared as Beatrice O'Reilly in the film Life of The Party: The Story of Beatrice, a story about a woman fighting her alcoholism. Her other film work includes Robert Altman's comedy-drama A Wedding (1978), Alan Alda's romantic comedy The Four Seasons (1981), John Huston's musical film Annie (1982), and Peter Bogdanovich's comedy Noises Off (1992). She took the supporting role of Carlotta Campion in the 1985 concert performance of Stephen Sondheim's Follies. In 1995, after an absence of 30 years, she was back on Broadway in Moon Over Buffalo, for which she was nominated for a Tony Award for Best Actress in a Play. Four years later, she appeared in the Broadway revue Putting It Together.

In the 1980s and 1990s, she made several attempts at starting a new variety program. She also appeared briefly on The Carol Burnett Show's "The Family" sketches' spinoff, Mama's Family, as her stormy character, Eunice Higgins. She played the matriarch in the cult comedy miniseries Fresno, which parodied the primetime soap opera Falcon Crest. In 1987 she starred in a variety sketch special, Carol, Carl, Whoopi and Robin alongside Carl Reiner, Whoopi Goldberg, and Robin Williams. That same year she starred in the TV movie Plaza Suite with Dabney Coleman and Hal Holbrook. She reunited with Julie Andrews in the ABC special Julie & Carol: Together Again which they performed at the Pantages Theatre in Hollywood. She returned to television with the comedy series Carol & Company from 1990 to 1991. She guest starred as herself in The Larry Sanders Show in 1992 and in the sitcom Mad About You, playing Theresa Stemple, the mother of main character Jamie Buchman (Helen Hunt), for which she won the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Guest Actress in a Comedy Series.

She made frequent appearances as a panelist on the game show Password, an association she maintained until the early 1980s (Mark Goodson awarded her his Silver Password All-Stars Award for best celebrity player; she is also credited with coming up with the title Password Plus, when it was originally titled Password '79). Burnett had long been a fan of the soap opera All My Children and realized a dream when Agnes Nixon created the role of Verla Grubbs for her in 1983. Burnett played the long-lost daughter of Langley Wallingford (Louis Edmonds), causing trouble for her stepmother Phoebe Tyler-Wallingford (Ruth Warrick). She made occasional appearances on the soap opera in each decade thereafter. She hosted a 25th-anniversary special about the show in 1995 and made a brief cameo appearance as Verla Grubbs on the January 5, 2005, episode which celebrated the show's 35th anniversary. She reprised her role as Grubbs in September 2011 as part of the series' finale. She also starred in television films such as Seasons of the Heart (1994).

2000–present: Pause and return to acting

Burnett's first voice role was in The Trumpet of the Swan in 2001. In 2008, she had her second role as an animated character in the film Horton Hears a Who! In 2012, she had another voice role as the character Hara in the US Disney-dubbed version of The Secret World of Arrietty. In 2019, she voiced a talking chair, named Chairol Burnett, in Toy Story 4.

Burnett similarly returned to film in 2005 to star in a different role as Queen Aggravain in the movie version of Once Upon a Mattress. She guest-starred in season two episodes of Desperate Housewives as Bree's stepmother, Elanor Mason. In 2009, she made a guest appearance on the Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, for which she was nominated for the Emmy Award for Outstanding Guest Actress in a Drama Series. In November 2010, she guest-starred on an episode of Glee as the mother of cheerleading coach Sue Sylvester. In 2014, Burnett joined two-time Tony Award winner Brian Dennehy on Broadway in A. R. Gurney's Love Letters. She appeared on the reboot of Hawaii Five-0 as Steve McGarrett's Aunt Debbie. Her appearances, traditionally on Thanksgiving-themed episodes, were featured from 2013 until the character died of cancer in the January 15, 2016, episode.

Burnett has mostly stayed away from the spotlight, yet she still earns honorary awards for her groundbreaking work in comedy. For instance in 2013, she received the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor at the Kennedy Center. Those who were there to honor Burnett included her longtime friends and collaborators Julie Andrews, Vicki Lawrence and Tim Conway, as well as Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, Maya Rudolph, Rashida Jones and Martin Short. In 2017, CBS aired The Carol Burnett Show: 50th Anniversary Special. The event featured Burnett, original cast members Vicki Lawrence and Lyle Waggoner, costume designer Bob Mackie and special guests Jim Carrey, Kristin Chenoweth, Stephen Colbert, Harry Connick Jr., Bill Hader, Jay Leno, Jane Lynch, Bernadette Peters, Maya Rudolph and Martin Short. Burnett spoke about the adversity she endured, saying "They said it was a man's game—Sid Caesar, Dean Martin, Milton Berle—because it hadn't been done. But that doesn't mean it couldn't be done."

In 2019, the Golden Globes created an award in Burnett's name, the Carol Burnett Award, for career achievement in television. Burnett was also announced as the first recipient of the award. The Hollywood Foreign Press said in a statement, "For more than 50 years, comedy trailblazer Carol Burnett has been breaking barriers while making us laugh". Steve Carell presented the award to Burnett.

Acting credits and accolades

Burnett has received 23 Primetime Emmy Award nominations with 6 wins for her work in The Garry Moore Show, Julie and Carol at Carnegie Hall, The Carol Burnett Show, Mad About You, and Palm Royale. In 2024 at age 91, she became the oldest nominee for a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series, for her work in Palm Royale.

She also received 18 Golden Globe Award nominations, winning 7 Awards, for her work on The Carol Burnett Show. She also received 3 Tony Awards and 3 Grammy Awards nominations, winning one of each.

Burnett also received various honors including 2 Peabody Awards, a Screen Actors Guild Life Achievement Award and a Star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. In 2003, she was honored with the Kennedy Center Honor. In 2005, she received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, awarded to her by President George W. Bush. In 2013, she received the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor. In 2019 she became the first recipient of the Carol Burnett Lifetime Achievement Award for Television, which was named in her honor.

On her 90th birthday she was honored with an NBC variety special entitled, Carol Burnett: 90 Years of Laughter + Love where various collaborators and performers paid tribute to her. This included Julie Andrews, Vicki Lawrence, Lily Tomlin, Steve Carell, Amy Poehler, Ellen DeGeneres, Bob Odenkirk, and Cher among many others.

Personal life

Marriages and family

Burnett married her college sweetheart Don Saroyan on December 15, 1955. They divorced in 1962.

On May 4, 1963, Burnett married television producer Joe Hamilton, a divorced father of eight and brother of actress Kipp Hamilton who had produced her 1962 Carnegie Hall concert. He later produced The Carol Burnett Show, among other projects. The couple had three daughters:

Carrie Hamilton (December 5, 1963 – January 20, 2002), who died at the age of 38 from pneumonia as a complication of lung and brain cancer. She was a writer and an actress.

Jody Hamilton (born January 18, 1967), a film producer and, as of 2023, the executive producer of The Stephanie Miller Show and an occasional actress.

Erin Hamilton (born August 14, 1968), a singer.

In early 1965 she had a miscarriage while in her ninth week of pregnancy.

Burnett and Hamilton's marriage ended in divorce in 1984. The challenge of coping with Carrie’s drug problems was mentioned as part of the reason for the separation, but the couple took the opportunity to inform other parents about handling such problems and raised money for the clinic in which Carrie was treated. In 1988, Burnett and Carrie took a trip to Moscow to help introduce the first Alcoholics Anonymous branch in the Soviet Union. Joe Hamilton died of cancer in 1991. Also in the 1980s, Burnett participated in a publicity campaign for MedicAlert, of which she is symbolically the

one millionth member with the one millionth bracelet.

On November 24, 2001, Burnett married drummer Brian Miller, who is 23 years her junior.

Burnett has enjoyed close friendships with Lucille Ball, Beverly Sills, Jim Nabors (who became the godfather to her daughter Jody), Julie Andrews and Betty White. She is the acting mentor to Vicki Lawrence. They share a close friendship, as noted by Lawrence in a testimonial speech during her appearance at Burnett's 2013 Mark Twain Award in Washington, D.C. (recorded and broadcast on PBS Television).

Philanthropy

In keeping with her promise to the anonymous benefactor who assisted her in 1954, she has contributed to scholarship programs at UCLA and the University of Hawaii to help people in financial need. On November 6, 2025, UCLA announced that Burnett had " endowed a scholarship at the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television (TFT). The scholarship will support high-potential undergraduate students in the school's Ray Bolger Musical Theater Program." At the same time, she donated more than 140 industry awards and honors and ephemera, which will be displayed on a rotating basis in the lobby of UCLA's Freud Playhouse.

Discography

Recording appearances as a singer:

Solo/duet albums

Carol Burnett Remembers How They Stopped the Show (1961). Decca. LP, digital.

Julie and Carol at Carnegie Hall – Julie Andrews and Carol Burnett (1962). Recording from Julie and Carol at Carnegie Hall TV special. Columbia Masterworks. LP, CD, digital.

Let Me Entertain You: Carol Burnett Sings (1964). Decca. LP, CD, digital.

Carol Burnett Sings (1967). RCA. LP, CD, digital.

Here's Carol! Carol Burnett Sings (1968). Vocalion. LP, digital.

Together Again for the First Time – Carol Burnett and Martha Raye (1968). Tetragrammaton Records. LP.

Julie and Carol at Lincoln Center – Julie Andrews and Carol Burnett (1971). Recording from Julie and Carol at Lincoln Center TV special. Columbia Masterworks. LP, CD, digital.

Carol Burnett Featuring 'If I Could Write a Song' (1972). Columbia. LP, CD, digital. (No. 199 US)

Julie Andrews and Carol Burnett: The CBS Television Specials – Julie Andrews and Carol Burnett (2012). Compilation of albums Julie and Carol at Carnegie Hall and Julie and Carol at Lincoln Center. Masterworks Broadway. CD, digital.

Other recordings

Once Upon a Mattress – Original Cast Recording (1959). Kapp Records. LP, CD, digital.

Three Billion Millionaires – Various Artists (1963). United Nations. LP.