Jane Wagner

Jane Wagner grew up in Morristown, Tennessee, and wrote for her school newspaper. At 17 she moved to New York, studied painting and sculpture at the School of Visual Arts, acted and worked as a textile designer.

Her first television script, “J.T.” (1969), about a lonely boy in Harlem who cares for an injured cat, won a Peabody Award. It caught the attention of the comedian Lily Tomlin, who invited Wagner to Los Angeles in 1971 to work on her comedy album. It was the beginning of a creative and personal partnership that has lasted more than fifty years.

Wagner wrote for Tomlin’s celebrated characters such as the little girl Edith Ann, and together they won several Emmy Awards for Tomlin’s television specials. In 1977 they co-wrote and co-directed Tomlin’s Broadway debut, “Appearing Nitely”. Wagner wrote the film “The Incredible Shrinking Woman” (1981). Her greatest success was the one-woman play “The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe” (1985), in which Tomlin played a dozen characters; it won a Drama Desk Award and a special award from the New York Drama Critics’ Circle and is regarded as a classic of feminist comedy.

For decades the two women kept their relationship out of the public eye, although it was an open secret in Hollywood. On 31 December 2013, after 42 years together, they married in Los Angeles. In 2020 Wagner received the Lambda Literary Visionary Prize.