Major acting honour for Lily Tomlin

Lily Tomlin is to receive the  highest tribute of the  Screen Actor's Guild in America, the  Life Achievement Award.

She will be will be presented with the award at the performers union's awards ceremony in January for 'embodying the finest ideals of the acting profession'.

Screen Actors' Guild  president Gabrielle Carteris said: 'Lily Tomlin is an extraordinary actress, as equally adept at narrative drama as in comedy roles. But it is through her many original characters that Lily’s creative genius fully shines. She has an ability to create diverse and distinct characters that are at once familiar, eccentric and oh so honest – in a way that illuminates life’s hidden corners. 

'Her characters are wholly unique, and by exposing every nuance of human behaviour they widen our scope of understanding. On behalf of nearly 160,000 members, we are honoured to bestow our  Life Achievement Award on the truly amazing Lily Tomlin.'

Tomlin has previously won the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor, multiple Emmys, two Tonys, a Grammy and a Writers Guild of America Award.

She first came to prominence in the  groundbreaking comedy series Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In in 1969, creating  characters such as the overbearing and snorting switchboard operator Ernestine, the philosophical five-and-a-half-year-old Edith Ann and the tasteful suburban socialite Mrs. Audrey Earbore III.

Tomlin has starred in six comedy specials and a solo Broadway run, and is currently starring alongside  Jane Fonda in the Netflix comedy Grace and Frankie, in which two mismatched women become friends as they reinvent themselves after their husbands decide to marry each other. 

Her movie credits include Robert Altman's Nashville, All of Me, with Steve Martin; Woody Allen’s Shadows and Fog and David O. Russell’s I Heart Huckabees.

The Screen Actor's Guild also points to her philanthropic work, on animal welfare, civil rights, health care, homelessness and LGBTQ  rights.

Published: 4 Aug 2016