This article includes mentions of disordered eating.
Radner’s popularity at the time cannot be overstated.
Here are more tragic details about “Saturday Night Live” original cast member Gilda Radner.
“The person disappeared but the shell was still there,” she wrote.
“Every time he saw me he would become emotional and well up with tears.”
Herman eventually fell into a coma, with machines keeping his heart beating.
“He was in the hospital just barely alive,” Gilda recalled.
He died six months later.
“It was a very hard thing to understand.
I was only a child.”
She endured another surgery, this one to remove part of her lung.
Thankfully, that second surgery did the trick, and her cancer didn’t return.
Other doctors were consulted, and she too went under the knife to have the lump removed.
“I guess I didn’t really understand what was happening.”
Her mother was alarmed enough to bring her to a doctor, who prescribed Dexedrine, a powerful stimulant.
There were, however, some severe side effects.
Achieving her dreams of stardom didn’t change her issues surrounding her body image.
Even when she became the toast of television, Radner was filled with self-loathing.
“I was very aware of her eating disorder.
“I weigh 104 pounds and I think I’m fat,” she wrote in a diary entry.
Another actor in that cast was Martin Short, whom Radner began dating while they worked together.
This was no fling; their relationship lasted for two years until they split up.
However, he also recalled that she struggled with chronic depression.
“And she wasn’t always happy …
I didn’t understand.”
She had relationships with Dan Aykroyd, Brian Doyle-Murray, and his brother, futurecomedy icon Bill Murray.
Interestingly, Radner sold that apartment to famed football commentatorJohn Madden, whose heartbreaking death came in 2021.
Sparks flew between Radner and Wilder, even though he was 13 years her senior.
Radner solved that particular problem quite quickly.
That freed her to pursue a new relationship with Wilder.
The pair moved in together, and in 1984 they flew to France and got married.
The settled down in an 18th-century mansion in Connecticut, far from the pressures of showbiz.
By all accounts, the two were deliriously happy.
“They were constant honeymooners,” Joan Ransohoff, Wilder’s friend, told Time.
“It was fun and infectious to be around them, they were so in love.”
That happiness, however, would prove to be short-lived when the specter of cancer re-entered her life.
Sadly, motherhood was something she would never experience.
As she wrote, she woke up one morning to discover she was bleeding profusely.
“I was having another miscarriage.
It was so soon, only a week after the pregnancy had been confirmed,” she wrote.
She recovered from that miscarriage, but felt her energy level to be uncharacteristically low.
“I had always had energy too much energy,” she wrote.
Just when she started to feel better, she’d once again feel tired.
Over time, she began to suspect there was something wrong, and made an appointment with her doctor.
She would receive a diagnosis that would, ultimately, change everything.
She underwent a complete physical.
“I had all my blood work done and chest X-rays and an electrocardiogram the whole deal.
There was nothing wrong with me,” Radner wrote in her book.
The doctor also suspected what she was experiencing was psychosomatic.
“He thought my symptoms might just be from depression,” she wrote.
Yet as the weeks passed and turned into months, she began experiencing unexplained pain in her abdomen.
She was sent to a gastroenterologist, who likewise couldn’t find any cause for the pain.
“He thought that my problems were emotional,” Radner wrote.
“He had heard that my recent movie hadn’t done well.”
Finally, a doctor ordered a CT scan to see if that would reveal anything.
It did; stage 4 ovarian cancer.
She was hospitalized and immediately underwent surgery.
After a course of chemotherapy, the news appeared to be positive.
Radner was told that her cancer had gone into remission.
However, her elation at having apparently beaten cancer did not last long.
There were whispers that her cancer had returned.
Tragically, those rumors were heartbreakingly true.
Less than four months after her issue of Life magazines hit the stands, she was sick again.
Her cancer was back, and had spread.
Three days later, she died in her sleep, with husband Gene Wilder by her side.
According to Wilder, he was blindsided.
“Until three weeks before Gilda died, I believed she would make it,” he wrote.
“Gilda was too strong a fighter.
Her spirit would never give in to cancer, I thought.
I was wrong.”
In his essay for People, Wilder shared that conviction.
“The fact is, Gilda didn’t have to die,” the actor wrote.
“But I was ignorant, Gilda was ignorant the doctors were ignorant.”
Wilder continued, “She could be alive today if I knew then what I know now.”
“But they didn’t,” he wrote.
“So Gilda went through the tortures of the damned and at the end, I felt robbed.”
Wilder went on to testify before Congress, sharing his experiences with a House subcommittee.
If you need help with an eating disorder, or know someone who does, help is available.
