Kelly Bishop Takes Us Behind the Scenes Of ‘Gilmore Girls’ in New Memoir
Kelly Bishop — born Carole Bishop, but forced to change her stage name early on due to 1970s-era SAG rules about members not sharing the same names — has lived a long and interesting life. In addition to playing Baby’s mom on Dirty Dancing, as well as a small role in one of my favorite book adaptations, Wonder Boys, starring Michael Douglas and Tobey Maguire, she is now most well-known for playing the complex, high-society matriarch Emily Gilmore on the hit show Gilmore Girls. And she has no problem with that; in addition to titling her just-released memoir The Third Gilmore Girl, she is a big fan of the show herself.
“I watched every episode of Gilmore Girls from the very beginning, whether I was in them or not,” she writes in The Third Gilmore Girl, which is out on shelves today. “I can honestly say I was one of the show’s biggest fans. Everything about it, from the writing to the cast to the direction to the production values, made me so proud to be a part of it.”
Like many viewers, Bishop could also recognize that what made Gilmore Girls so great was Amy Sherman-Palladino‘s whip-smart writing; therefore, Season 7, which brought in a new writing team due to contract issues, was not her favorite.
“I know they tried their best, but there’s no such thing as ‘trying to be’ Amy Sherman-Palladino. We actors were contractually obligated for that seventh season, and we did the best we could too,” she writes. However, she added, “It just seemed to get kind of sleepy and tired from one week to the next, as if the air was being slowly let out of a big, sparkly balloon, and we could sense that the party might be ending, even though no one wanted to say it out loud.”
Bishop was therefore not entirely surprised when the show got canceled after that disastrous (my words, not hers!) last season.
Warner Bros. Television / courtesy Everett Collection
“It’s such a cliché to say it was like seeing your family split apart against their will, and yet that’s exactly how it felt,” she wrote about the inevitable end of the original run of the beloved show. “We’d become so close, personally and professionally, and been through so much together over those seven years.”
What is perhaps most interesting about the memoir is how little Bishop has in common to her beloved Gilmore Girls character, the delightfully snobbish-but-well-meaning Emily Gilmore, who wants to have a better relationship with her daughter Lorelai (Lauren Graham) so badly but has nothing but trouble doing so, because of her conservative upbringing and judgmental social circles. Bishop can understand this, but not relate. Born in Colorado to an alcoholic, abusive father and little money, Bishop is about as far away from the wealthy, suburban Connecticut women of the DAR in Emily Gilmore’s circle as you can get. But you don’t have to be from the same place or even have anything in common with a character to understand them. She could see that her character, despite her elitist nature, cared for her family deeply.
“In true ‘what I fear, I create’ form, she relentlessly made it difficult for Lorelai to be around her, and then resented Lorelai for keeping her distance,” she wrote about Emily’s relationship to her daughter. “If Emily had been a one-dimensional woman who adores her granddaughter but was never anything but mean and demanding with her daughter, she might have worn thin with me, and with the audience,” she added. “I was always convinced, though, that Emily loved Lorelai as much as she loved Rory, she just didn’t have a clue how to connect with her, and her frustration over that only added to her icy disapproval.”
Adam Taylor/ABC Family/courtesy Everett Collection
Bishop, a former dancer who was raised for much of her life by a single mother, is actually much more like Lorelai or even Rory, in terms of her own life story (and probably the most like her other onscreen daughter — okay, daughter-in-law — Sutton Foster‘s Vegas showgirl character Michelle in the short-lived Palladino family drama Bunheads. In fact, it was a play the two did together that Amy Sherman-Palladino saw that inspired her to cast Foster in Bunheads).
Bishop had a very close relationship with her mother, especially once she divorced her father, akin to the one Rory and Lorelai shared, calling her “a remarkable woman and my best friend.” Her grandma, Louise, was also a single mother, who “got pregnant with my mom about two months after 16th birthday,” Bishop writes, by a “drifter who passed through Colorado Springs just long enough to fleece people in poker games, impregnate Louise, and marry her for a few minutes.” Sounds a lot like… the plot of Gilmore Girls? (And if you’ve ever seen A Chorus Line, it may sound familiar too, because much of Bishop’s lines for her Tony Award-winning role as Sheila came from her own life.)
Having spent much of her adult life prior to becoming Emily Gilmore as a dancer and a broadway actress, including a very successful run of A Chorus Line (for more behind-the-scenes moments on that production, definitely check out her memoir), Bishop was also nowhere near as financially successful as the elder Gilmores. However, none of this prevented Bishop from doing an amazing job playing Emily.
Some of her favorite scenes, she mentions in the book, revolve around episodes where Emily becomes a bit more like Kelly — less rigid, more emotional; more human. From the time Emily goes off the deep end after her mother-in-law dies and she finds a letter from the eldest Lorelai begging Richard not to marry her, to the time in the Gilmore Girls miniseries revival, when she is raw from her husband’s death (written into the show because Ed Herrmann, who played her longtime husband Richard, had recently died), and snaps at a Daughters of the Revolution meeting.
Scott Humbert /The CW /Courtesy Everett Collection
Another favorite scene she notes is one after Emily discovers the Huntzbergers, the parents of Rory’s college boyfriend Logan, disapprove of Rory and think she’s beneath him because the Gilmores are not quite as rich as they are, which causes Emily to go off in the middle of yet another DAR function.
“That event that Emily confronted Shira Huntzberger. The mother of Rory’s boyfriend,” Bishop writes. “Emily had the satisfying pleasure of eviscerating Shira at her center table. I kept a smile on Emily’s face so that, from a distance, it could have appeared that she was complementing Shira on her dress and asking who designed it, while she was actually delivering lines like, ‘You were a two-bit gold digger fresh off the bus from Hicksville when you met Mitchum at whatever bar you stumbled into,’ and referring to Shira’s husband, ‘He’s still a playboy, you know. Well, of course you know. That would explain why your weight goes up and down thirty pounds every other month.’ It was an absolute masterpiece by Amy and a joy to deliver, not only because it was Emily at her force-of-nature best but also because it was another display of her fierce love for her granddaughter.”
For more behind-the-scenes memories of Gilmore Girls — and plenty of interesting tidbits about showbiz throughout the years, as well as Bishop’s first big success, Dirty Dancing — check out The Third Gilmore Girl, out today.
Remind