Jackie Collins

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18 Lainie Kazan one knows by now, and vaulted the movie into cinema history. Kazan has welcomed this unexpected career coup much like she welcomes everything in her life: with grace and humility. “It’s a phenomenal experience and I feel blessed, I truly do,” she said with passion rising in her voice. This unexpected bounty has left Kazan justifiably giddy with happiness and having the time of her life. And she’s thrilled she’ll be sharing details of it with her Long Island audience during her concert performance at Westbury this month. She said it will be the very sweetest kind of homecoming. “The very first professional job I had after getting my Equity Card was at Westbury,” she said proudly. The Hofstra graduate reflected lovingly on her time spent on Long Island. “I love Long Island. Some of the best years of my life were spent there,” she recalled. The past two years have been a professional and personal challenge for many reasons, she revealed during the interview. Gearing up for that much-deserved threeday R&R break, she happily shared insights into her successful career trajectory. Kazan’s professional pedigree reads like a how-to manual in breaking into and staying solvent in, show biz. From community theater when she was a youngster, to Broadway, Kazan has shared the stage, movie and television studios with the likes of Frank Sinatra, Peter O’Toole, Barbra Streisand and Andrea Martin, to name but a few luminaries. Her experience runs the gamut from playing a corpse whose death was off-screen, in 1968’s forgettable movie Lady in Cement (with Sinatra), to portraying the recurring television role of Grace’s endearing Aunt Honey in Will & Grace. From being a chorine in Hofstra University’s productions of The Student Prince and South Pacific, to carving a niche for herself on television’s My Big Fat Greek Life, Kazan has successfully made her mark in the business for the past 35 years. From B-movies to critically-acclaimed films (My Favorite Year, Beaches, Harry and the Hendersons, The Cemetery Club and 29 th Street) and television shows (St. Elsewhere, The Nanny, Veronica’s Closet and Touched By an Angel), Kazan has not only acted her way up the Hollywood ladder, she’s also been impressing live audiences with her cabaret performances for decades. She grew up admiring the likes of Milton Berle and Lucille Ball, gleaning comedy tips from those two veterans of the genre. Kazan has also appeared on The Dean Martin Show an unprecedented 26 times, and produced and starred in Broadway’s allstar tribute to Ethel Merman. The tribute, a benefit for the Gay Men’s Health Crisis, was dubbed “Doin’ What Comes Natur’lly,” and also featured powerhouse stars Bette Midler, Patti LuPone, Madeline Kahn, Elaine Stritch and Andrea Martin. She’s sung with the Boston Lainie Kazan and Michael Constantine on the set of CBS’s My Big Fat Greek Life Pops and Cleveland Pops and before sold-out venues throughout the U.S., Europe and Asia. She’s also lent her name to Playboy clubs in Los Angeles and New York – “Lainie’s Room” and “Lainie’s Room East.” When she’s on the East Coast she typically plays sold-out shows at two favorite haunts, The Algonquin and Regency hotels. She’s been Tony and Emmy-nominated and received television’s CableACE Faux/Fantasy Finishing Wall Texturing Murals Trompe L’oeil Decorative Furniture Painting Stenciling Patches of Art by Cecilia Enhancing the decor of your home or office using time-honored craftmanship to create innovative interiors for today’s discerning client. For Free Consultation, Please Call: (516) 731-8353 salon Now Open Every Day! blueand day spa 505 Westbury Avenue, Carle Place • 516 333-2427 Mother’s Day Special Buy One Spa Package - Get One Free! 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May 2002 • LONG ISLAND WOMAN • 21 Lainie Kazan Award. Her CDs include Lainie Kazan in the Groove and Body and Soul. Her philanthropic works include board membership on the Young Musician’s Foundation, B’nai Brith and the AIDS Project in Los Angeles. Her role models were rich and varied, she said, from Hollywood entertainers to educational colleagues. “I absolutely idolized Judy Garland and got a lot of inspiration from her,” she said. An avid moviegoer since she was small, Kazan knew she was born to entertain and rehearsed during many a family gathering. Which explains her penchant for performing live in front of an appreciative audience. Her vocal prowess, a dark mixture of sultry and passionate tinged with humor, has won acclaim from reviewers worldwide and her ability to charm an audience is apparent in her guilelessness. She connects to a live audience because she shares personal tidbits in a sophisticated, yet playful, manner. “I think that being on a nightclub stage is as close to the real me as you can get,” she said. Playing a character is wonderful, but when she performs before a live audience, there’s a magic that’s lacking on movie or television sets, she reflected. “I am who I am (on stage), not playing a character. And all the facets of my life are out there in my songs – the funny ones, the tragic ones. I’m very free on stage, it’s very liberating,” she said. And she has no plans to take it easy either, despite being temporarily sidelined last year by a bad hip. A dancer since she was a youngster in neighborhood dance class, Kazan chalks up her bad hip to countless performances since toddlerhood. Her first public appearance was at age 4-1/2, in front of an audience at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. She won the crowd over with her toddler rendition of “I’ll Be Down to Get You In a Taxi, Honey,” which she sang laughingly, to prove she still knew the words. But knowing the words doesn’t help when you have a bum hip, she continued. Fortunately, the hip surgery she underwent last year was a complete success and her much-improved health imbued her with a new sense of enthusiasm for performing live. “I am very happy right now and my life is very comfortable. In fact, I’m doing fantastic,” she said with a laugh that sounded like singing. Before the surgery she was in constant pain, she added. “My hip was getting worse and worse every day. But as soon as I had the operation, I got better and better every day.” No cane, no pain, she said. The timing couldn’t have been better, either, considering her television sitcom schedule is a grueling five days a week, sometimes 12 hours a day. “I’m not complaining,” she emphasized. “I’m very grateful to be so busy and I have never had this kind of extraordinary success.” But the differences between filming a movie and a television show are vast. “There’s a lot of memorization, last-minute changes and the tension and the pressure is enormous,” she continued. “We have to go out there and not just make the audience laugh, we have to please the network, the producers, a lot of different people.” With her extensive experience in numerous entertainment genres, how does acting in a weekly sitcom compare to movie-making? With the movies, she said, it’s a whole other ball game. “The producers don’t see it until the movie is finished and the pressure is lessened,” she said. When asked about the LIW Digital Edition Bonus Pages general negative critical response to the television’s premiere episodes, she shrugged it off. “The movie (My Big Fat Greek Wedding) didn’t get great reviews either,” she said matter-of-factly. “But people love it. The television show came in first and second (the first two weeks) so we must have captured an audience. I think we did great and it’s one of the highest-rated shows this year.” How does her character compare to the real Lainie? “Maria is a warm and loving mother and I think I am,” she reflected. “She’s also a generous soul and I think I am, too. She’s not quite as sophisticated as I am but those are the qualities that people are responding to right now. “I’m everybody’s mother – there for her kids, totally supportive and doesn’t expect that much of them,” she said, adding that the mother may be similar to other ethnic characters she’s portrayed in film and theater. “I don’t share her (Maria’s) taste in clothes or hair because my tastes run wild. But that’s because I grew up in another culture, really counter-culture,” said the 1960 graduate of Brooklyn’s once-prestigious Erasmus Hall High School, an institution known for its high scholastic requirements. “Brooklyn then was lovely and wonderful and safe and I had two parents who were very unusual. We were not your average Jewish family,” she said. “My father was a bookie and my mother was like the Jewish Blanche Dubois, very dramatic,” she chuckled. 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For a free consultation call today. Smithtown (631) 864-4646 Riverhead (631) 727-3115 Lainie Kazan interview from Long Island Woman Archives – May 2003
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