Carol Burnett Popular Books

Carol Burnett Biography & Facts

Carol Creighton Burnett (born April 26, 1933) is an American comedian, actress, and singer. Her comedy-variety show The Carol Burnett Show, which originally aired on CBS, was one of the first to be hosted by a woman. She has performed on Broadway, on television, and in film of varying genres, including dramatic and comedic roles. She has received numerous accolades, including seven Primetime Emmy Awards, a Tony Award, a Grammy Award, and seven Golden Globe Awards. Burnett was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2005, the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor in 2013, and the Screen Actors Guild Life Achievement Award in 2015. Burnett was born and raised in San Antonio, Texas, until her family moved to Hollywood, living a block away from Hollywood Boulevard. She attended Hollywood High School and eventually studied theater and musical comedy at UCLA. Later, she performed in nightclubs in New York City and had a breakout success on Broadway in 1959 in Once Upon a Mattress, for which she received a Tony Award nomination. She soon made her television debut, regularly appearing on The Garry Moore Show for the next three years, and won her first Emmy Award in 1962. Burnett had her television special debut in 1963 when she starred as Calamity Jane in the Dallas State Fair Musicals production of Calamity Jane on CBS. Eventually, Burnett moved back to Los Angeles and began an 11-year run as star of The Carol Burnett Show on CBS television from 1967 to 1978. With its vaudeville roots, The Carol Burnett Show was a variety show that combined comedy sketches with song and dance. The comedy sketches included film parodies and character pieces. Burnett created many memorable characters during the show's run, and both she and the show won numerous Emmy and Golden Globe Awards. During and after her variety show, Burnett appeared in many television and film projects. Burnett’s film roles include Pete 'n' Tillie (1972), The Front Page (1974), A Wedding (1978), The Four Seasons (1981), Annie (1982), Noises Off (1992), and Horton Hears a Who! (2008). She has acted in the dramas 6 Rms Riv Vu (1974) and Friendly Fire (1979); in guest roles such as in Mad About You, for which she won an Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Guest Actor in a Comedy Series; and in various specials with Julie Andrews, Dolly Parton, and Beverly Sills. She returned to Broadway in Moon Over Buffalo (1995), receiving another Tony Award nomination. She returned to acting taking roles in the AMC drama series Better Call Saul (2022) and in the Apple TV+ comedy series Palm Royale (2024). Burnett has written and narrated several memoirs, earning Grammy nominations for almost all of them, including a win for In Such Good Company. In 2019, the Golden Globes named an award after her for career achievement in television, the Carol Burnett Award, and Burnett received her first award. She was honored with an NBC special Carol Burnett: 90 Years of Laughter + Love celebrating her 90th birthday. 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. 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. She 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. After graduating from Hollywood High School in 1951, she received an anonymous envelope containing $50 for one year's tuition at UCLA, where she initially planned on studying journalism. During her first year of college, she switched her focus to theater arts and English, with the goal of becoming a playwright. She found she had to take an acting course to enter the playwright program. On the subject, she later reflected: "I wasn't really ready to do the acting thing, but I had no choice." During her first performance, she got a sudden impulse to speak her lines in a new way. "Don't ask me why, but when we were in front of the audience, I suddenly decided I was going to stretch out all my words and my first line came out 'I'm baaaaaaaack!'" The audience response moved her deeply:They laughed and it felt great. All of a sudden, after so much coldness and emptiness in my life, I knew the sensation of all that warmth wrapping around me. I had always been a quiet, shy, sad sort of girl and then everything changed for me. You spend the rest of your life hoping you'll hear a laugh that great again. During this time, she performed in several university productions, garnering recognition for her comedic and musical abilities. Her mother disapproved of her acting ambitions:She wanted me to be a writer. She said you can always write, no mat.... Discover the Carol Burnett popular books. Find the top 100 most popular Carol Burnett books.