Who Did ‘SNL’ Star Gilda Radner Date and Marry?
Gilda Radner was one of the break-out members of the original Saturday Night Live cast, with characters like Emily Litella, Baba Wawa and “Nerd” Lisa Loopner making her such an instant star that she even had her own one-woman Broadway revue in 1979. Radner’s love life was equally impressive and surprising — while most comedy fans know about her romantic and working relationship with husband Gene Wilder, her dating history actually involved a number of men who would become the most famous comedians of their generation.
Martin Short
Radner’s career started with a 1972 Toronto production of Godspell that starred a number of future comedy heavyweights, including Eugene Levy and Martin Short, whom Radner started dating. Short recalled, “She was four years older, so I was a little more naive. I was 22. She was more complex than I thought she was from initially meeting her. So that would lead to fights and that would lead to makeups. She had lots of psychological scarring from her childhood.”
The pair broke up during the production, though Radner assumed they would get back together; instead, Short met Nancy Dolman, an understudy on the show, who he would marry in 1980 and stay with until her death in 2010.
Dan Aykroyd
Aykroyd and Radner paired off before filming the original season of SNL — Canadian Aykroyd met Radner during the half-decade she lived in Toronto, working first on Godspell and then at the Toronto branch of the famous Second City improv group. In the SNL oral history Live From New York, Aykroyd said, “I was involved with Gilda, yeah. I was in love with her. But that was in the early days of Second City in Canada. Our romance was finished by the time Saturday Night Live happened. We were friends, lovers, then friends again.”
Bill Murray
Radner and Murray, however, did hook up while working together at Studio 8H. Murray joined in the show’s second season, replacing Chevy Chase; he and Radner soon had a hit set of recurring characters, “Nerds” Todd and Lisa. According to fellow cast members, the two were sometimes on the outs very publicly on set — in Live From New York, Laraine Newman recalled, “I can remember them coming to read-through and fighting. And she was furious with him and she’d just told him not to talk to her and he’d be begging her — and this would be acted out in front of all of us.”
In the same book, Murray recalled Radner as “really an extraordinary and spectacular person … I never enjoyed making anyone laugh more than her.”
Paul Simon
Shelley Duvall, Paul Simon, and Gilda Radner on set of SNL – December 1977. pic.twitter.com/mV777BcVxG
— Shelley Duvall Archive (@shelleyduvallxo) July 3, 2023
Radner and Simon were involved at some point in the late ’70s, around the same time he was becoming involved with future wife Carrie Fisher. As Fisher told Live From New York, “There was a time when Gilda had gotten a very big crush on Paul and then I went out with Paul and then there was sort of a drama and somehow I remember being on the phone with Gilda and there was crying.” Fisher and Simon married in summer 1983 and were divorced by the end of summer 1984; Fisher and Radner never reconciled.
Harold Ramis
Though there isn’t too much out there about their relationship, it’s said that the director and Radner were involved at one point. In the documentary Love, Gilda, one of Radner’s childhood friends remarked that “Gilda used to say it was hard for her to see Ghostbusters, because every single guy in the movie had been her boyfriend at one time or another.”
G.E. Smith
Though G.E. Smith is most famous for his years leading the SNL band, he and Radner actually didn’t meet on set; rather, they met when Smith was hired to play guitar in her 1979 live Broadway show.
The pair married soon after, in 1980, but their union was destined to be short-lived; Radner met Gene Wilder in 1982, and she and Smith divorced soon after.
Gene Wilder
When Wilder and Radner met on the set of the 1982 film Hanky Panky, Radner described it as “love at first sight.” As she wrote in her memoir, It’s Always Something, “It felt like my life went from black and white to Technicolor. Gene was funny and athletic and handsome, and he smelled good. I was bitten with love.” She supposedly told him on the first day they met that they would eventually marry.
The pair did tie the knot in 1984, but their happiness was brief for a tragic reason — one year later, Radner fell ill, and in 1986, she was diagnosed with stage IV ovarian cancer. Treatments led the cancer to go into remission, but in 1988, it came back; Radner passed away on May 20, 1989.
Wilder became passionate about supporting people with cancer after Radner’s death; he cofounded the cancer community organization Gilda’s Club, and testified before Congress about the misdiagnoses that cut Radner’s life short.
In a 1991 interview in People, Wilder said, “If I need to cry or think a little bit, I’ll go over to the cemetery where she is buried to make sure the tree our friends planted is doing well and the grounds are kept up. I think one of the things that would make Gilda happiest is if Sparkle, her Yorkshire terrier, pee-peed right on top of her grave. One for Mama. She’d laugh.”
Remind 
1970s Fall TV
September 2023
Take a trip back to the ’70s by looking at the TV Guide Magazine Fall Preview primetime lineups.
Buy This Issue