Actress Kelly Bishop was at a gas station in northern New Jersey one morning when the title for her new memoir, at the time just a few chapters underway, suddenly materialized.
Best known for her supporting role as Emily Gilmore, the blue-blooded, demanding and deliciously sardonic matriarch on the quirky TV comedy-drama Gilmore Girls (2000-2007), Bishop was dressed down in sweats, sunglasses and a baseball cap when a teenage boy gently approached her. (Fans “come out of the strangest places,” she muses.)
He’d recognized what Gilmore Girls creator Amy Sherman-Palladino refers to in the memoir’s foreword as Bishop’s unmistakable “whiskey voice,” and relayed that he’d been binge-watching the show on Netflix. Emily was his favorite character, and would always be, he assured her, “the third Gilmore Girl.” (The show stars two: Emily’s daughter, Lorelai, played by Lauren Graham, and granddaughter, Rory, played by Alexis Bledel.)
It wasn’t the first time she’d heard a fan invoke that phrase, but amid her current absorption in building a book, it seized her. The Third Gilmore Girl, out now (Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster), traces Bishop’s life up to and beyond her career-defining role on the beloved series—from her ballet roots out West, to her Tony-winning role in Broadway’s original production of A Chorus Line, to her unexpected gig in Dirty Dancing, to her decades-long marriage to TV personality Lee Leonard.
Bishop (top right) in Gilmore Girls with Edward Herrmann (top left) and, from bottom left, Lauren Graham, Alexis Bledel and David Sutcliffe. Photo: Courtesy of Gallery Books/Photofest/WB/Ron Batzdorff
The quotidian scene of Bishop, who has lived in South Orange for nearly 30 years, stopping to fuel her car in loungewear and happily chat with a stranger is a far cry from the “severe, uncompromising” character of Emily Gilmore, as Bishop describes her—who sports Chanel suits and discards maids like Kleenex, turns up her nose at her granddaughter’s high-school commute (“I hate that she takes the bus. Drug dealers take the bus.”) and, in one episode, refuses a breathalyzer after a police officer pulls her over (“Young man, I don’t know where that’s been,” she drawls, eyeing him with arctic disdain, “but I can say with absolute certainty, it won’t be going anywhere near my mouth.”)
Although inherently elegant, self-assured and occasionally, as she recounts in her memoir, coolly confrontational when warranted, Bishop, 80, unlike her most popular on-screen persona, has maintained a lifelong aversion to snobbery.
“I think there is so much pretense with people when they’re striving for not only social acceptance, but some sort of elite place or group of people,” she tells New Jersey Monthly. “A lot of covering; a lot of wearing the right outfit and having the right diamond ring—all that stuff that frankly doesn’t interest me too much.”
Bishop has been “strong-willed about what worked for me and what didn’t for as long as I can remember,” she writes in her memoir. Born Carole Jane in Colorado Springs, she grew up in Denver with an older brother, Tony. Not dissimilar to the dynamic between her future TV daughter and granddaughter on Gilmore Girls, Bishop’s mother, Jane, was her “best friend.” Her father, Lawrence, on the other hand, was a “detached, mean, alcoholic bully,” whose family lived in frequent fear of his rage and abuse. Life was “peaceful” when he was away, which he often was, working various airline jobs and philandering.
As a child, Bishop loved sitting on a stool beside her mother as she pressed her husband’s shirts at the ironing board. “She was a lonely woman…and when I kept insisting that I couldn’t go to sleep, which I couldn’t, then we’d get into these talks,” Bishop recalls to us. “She’s the one who opened up so many thoughts for me and told me so many stories that may have even been inappropriate for a child my age. But she made me very sophisticated as a result.”
Since her first day of kindergarten, Bishop detested school, where she seldom spoke or socialized. When she was eight, her mother, a ballet enthusiast, began giving her lessons on their basement linoleum, hoping to invigorate her. Instantly, Bishop was hooked. It “lit a fire in me that ended up defining my future,” she writes. Her father refused to pay for ballet classes, so her mother started playing piano at Denver’s American Ballet Theatre in exchange for Bishop’s tuition.
At 18, itching to make a living as a dancer, Bishop moved to New York City, staying with family friends from Denver in the Bronx upon her arrival. She was crushed not to be accepted into the American Ballet Theatre’s company, but soon joined Radio City Music Hall’s corps de ballet—the “far lesser-known dance troupe” with “a separate stage door from the Rockettes,” she writes.
After her considerable quietude as a schoolgirl, and as a young ballet dancer—“you don’t talk at all; you don’t even make facial expressions, really, or you can get into trouble,” she says—living on her own on the mean streets of Manhattan saw her begin to speak up more freely.
“I’d spent so many years in a nonverbal place that once my mouth opened up, my heavens—I couldn’t believe what was coming out of it sometimes,” Bishop chuckles. “And then it felt good to be able to express myself, so I continued to do so the rest of my life.”
Someplace along the way, she also discovered she was funny. “And I loved being funny—so that [kept] me talking,” she adds.
In the 1960s, Bishop worked as a Las Vegas showgirl—briefly leaning on “pep pills” (amphetamine) amid her grueling schedule—and danced in two Broadway shows: Golden Rainbow (starring Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gormé) and Promises, Promises (created by Burt Bacharach, Hal David and Neil Simon). In the latter, she met her first husband, Peter Miller, who turned out to be a compulsive gambler. He “pretty much cleaned me out, emotionally and financially,” she writes. Their five-year marriage ended in a messy, two-year-long divorce.
In 1975 came Bishop’s big break: a principal role as Sheila Bryant in Broadway’s A Chorus Line. The musical sold out on opening night, became a major tourist attraction, and was credited with saving Broadway from a years-long decline. It “changed my life,” she writes. Composer Marvin Hamlisch and lyricist Edward Kleban even based one of the songs, “At the Ballet,” on real-life childhood reminiscences Bishop had shared in the show’s early brainstorming sessions.
She won a Tony for her performance—best featured actress in a musical—and took a photo that night with Edward Herrmann, who’d won best featured actor in a play. Unbeknownst to both of them, they’d reunite a few decades later on Gilmore Girls as TV husband and wife. (Herrmann died in 2014 after a battle with brain cancer, not long before a 2015 reunion of the series’ cast members at the ATX TV Festival in Texas; an empty chair graced the stage in his honor.)
A decade after A Chorus Line—and following stints like her first TV acting job in an episode of Hawaii Five-O (1976); her first small movie role in An Unmarried Woman (1978); guest spots in soap operas; and a stock job on a traveling tour of Rodgers and Hart musical Pal Joey (1983)—Dirty Dancing came calling.
Bishop was originally cast in the small role of Vivian, a Kellerman’s resort guest interested in seducing Patrick Swayze’s character, Johnny. She writes that it had taken her “a minute and a half” to learn her lines—so when the producer requested a two-week rehearsal, she was bewildered. She concluded that she’d be asked to shoot some dancing scenes with Swayze, which suited her just fine.
When she arrived on set in Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains, she was instead offered the role of Marjorie Houseman, mother of Jennifer Grey’s character, Baby. “Frankly, the role…hadn’t really leaped off the page at me,” she admits in the memoir. But, thrilled by the prospect of working on a film from start to finish, in such a beautiful location to boot, she accepted.
Kelly Bishop’s memoir is out now from Gallery Books.
There was “such comfort between the crew and the cast” who were “stuck together on those mountains,” she says fondly, recalling such “mischievous” fun as being slipped alcoholic beverages toward the end of filming the final dance number, which took four or five days. “None of us thought [the movie] was gonna be any good,” she says. “I mean, we didn’t think it was gonna be a hit”—until they heard the “delightful” soundtrack. She still gets chills when she hears the closing song, “(I’ve Had) The Time of My Life.”
In 2000, on the heels of The Sopranos’ debut and ensuing craze the previous year, Bishop’s agent sent her a pilot script. “Refreshingly, the title didn’t sound Italian at all,” she writes. Upon reading, it was “love at first sight….The dialogue was smart, razor-sharp, and unpredictable. The humor was a delight, and utterly unique.” Bishop phoned her agent immediately with an “emphatic ‘Yes, please.’”
Gilmore Girls originally aired on the WB (now CW) and is currently streaming on Netflix (along with its 2016 revival miniseries, Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life.) It follows free-spirited single mother Lorelai Gilmore as she raises her bookish 16-year-old daughter, Rory, in the fictional small town of Stars Hollow, Connecticut. The show is revered for its unabating stream of witty banter; its sweeping, and sometimes irreverent, cultural and historical references; and its revolving door of eccentric characters (“I’m fascinated by oddballs,” Bishop says).
Kelly Bishop, Alexis Bledel and Lauren Graham at the 2016 premiere of Netflix’s Gilmore Girls: A Year In The Life.
The chance to inhabit high-society matriarch Emily Gilmore was exciting for a number of reasons. “For so long, I was kind of pigeonholed into this sexy girlfriend type,” Bishop says. “And that was fine—but to suddenly be this very classy, wealthy woman, it put me into another category.”
Not to mention, she writes, playing a “cold, condescending, emotionally distant” mother is “infinitely more fun than playing a nice one.”
Some of the show’s storylines also posed an opportunity to explore her own family dynamics. She actually modeled Emily after her own grandmother, Louise, who—like Emily’s daughter, Lorelai—became pregnant at 16. She felt “a lot of sympathy” for Louise, despite the fact that she was “awful” to Bishop’s mother. “Just a tough, tough woman,” she recalls. “Very classy—without the money—but certainly a taste and dignity, and a good front.”
Gilmore Girls creator Amy Sherman-Palladino writes in the memoir’s foreword that she knew she’d found Emily “three words” into Bishop’s audition, noting her “perfect comic timing.” Indeed, Bishop volleyed lines from the famously dense scripts to her fellow fast-talking cast members with balletic ease and precision.
Both women—Sherman-Palladino in her writing, Bishop in her acting—also let Emily’s insecurities and vulnerabilities seep through cracks in her upper-crust veneer, deftly offsetting some of her more villainous qualities.
Bishop reunited with Sherman-Palladino to star alongside Sutton Foster on the one-season ABC Family series Bunheads (2012-2013), and, most recently, for three guest appearances on Amazon Prime Video’s The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, which ended last year.
Bishop moved to South Orange in 1995 with her dear husband of nearly 40 years, Lee Leonard, who hosted programs on ESPN (its first-ever), CNN and News 12 New Jersey. He died in 2018 following years of difficult illnesses.
Though Bishop says she’s had to “just accept the fact that I’m gonna miss him every day for the rest of my life,” she feels “blessed” to have experienced such a loving partnership: “There are a lot of people who have successful marriages who didn’t have that kind of comfort and communication and fun.”
Bishop lives a “rather quiet life” in the Garden State these days, keeping to a “very small radius” in South Orange, Maplewood, Millburn, Livingston and West Orange. She does Pilates in Millburn, and lives “an eight-minute drive” from Paper Mill Playhouse, where she sits on the advisory board. (Her commute decades earlier, while dancing in a production at the theater? Hitching a ride from Manhattan on the back of a fellow dancer’s bike. “We’d hop on his motorcycle [and onto] the Turnpike,” she recalls.)
She’s comfortable around so many New York transplants and commuters—“the same level of sophistication that you find in the city; the same intelligence”—and has always appreciated her community’s multiculturalism.
Whenever “racial issues arise” in the country, she says, “I want to bring people on tours of my neighborhood,” where residents of all races and nationalities “get along so well.” Passing strangers look each other in the eye and exchange pleasantries. “There’s a real civility about living here.”
Often she sits out on her deck, reveling in the trees and green and silence.
“I am now,” she declares, “a Jersey girl.”
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