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Lily Tomlin Casually Announces Plans To Marry

Lily Tomlin, who has been with her partner Jane Wagner for 42 years, said recently that the Supreme Court rulings on DOMA have made them think about getting married. The 74-year old actress and comedi...
Lily Tomlin Casually Announces Plans To Marry
Written by Amanda Crum
  • Lily Tomlin, who has been with her partner Jane Wagner for 42 years, said recently that the Supreme Court rulings on DOMA have made them think about getting married.

    The 74-year old actress and comedian says they don’t want anything traditional, but now that the doors have been opened up for them to make things official they want to take advantage of it.

    “We’re thinking maybe we’ll get married,” she told E! News. “You don’t really need to get married, but marriage is awfully nice. Everybody I know who got married, they say it really makes a difference. They feel very very happy about it.”

    Tomlin has said that Jane, who is also a comedy writer and has collaborated with her partner on several projects, has inspired her over the years.

    “Jane took me to another level because she’s truly a wonderful writer. I’d put things together in the past and struggled with them. And then I met Jane. I was doing my Edith Ann album in ’71 — the album came out in ’72. She’d done a thing on television called J.T. — it was about a kid in Harlem — and she won a Peabody for it. I later learned it was the first thing she’d ever written. It was written as an After School Special, but they played it in prime time — and they played it every year after that for about 25 years, or something. Anyway, I saw it and it was wonderful. It was poetic and sensitive and satiric and tender and funny and so many things compressed into this one hour. And I thought, ”Oh, God, this is exactly what I want in a monologue.” So I wrote Jane and asked her to help me do the Edith Ann album. I didn’t hear from her for a while. Then, suddenly, about a week before I was supposed to go in and record, she sent me a lot of material. I persuaded her to come to California and help me produce it. Frankly, I was pretty taken with her as soon as I saw her. We just sort of clicked. We became a couple right away,” she said.

    Tomlin spoke publicly about her sexuality for the first time in 2000, on a New York-based television show called Gay USA; however, she said that she has never kept her relationship with Jane a secret and has talked about her partner several times in interviews, only to see it glossed over later.

    “Everybody in the industry was certainly aware of my sexuality and of Jane,” she said. “In interviews I always reference Jane and talk about Jane, but they don’t always write about it.”

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