Kelly Bishop grew up as Carole Bishop, and it wasn’t until right before the Tony Awards, when she won Best Featured Actress in a Musical for her role in “A Chorus Line,” that she made the decision to change her first name to Kelly. Her fellow performers in the classic Michael Bennett Broadway show gave each other nicknames, and Kelly was hers. There was already a Carole Bishop in the Screen Actors Guild roster, so when she won the award, her new name was announced. So began the rise of Kelly Bishop who would go on to more roles on Broadway, a supporting lead role in “Dirty Dancing,” and then to become the matriarch of the Gilmore family in the beloved series “Gilmore Girls.”
With a career that’s spanned over 50 years, Bishop is sharing all the parts of her life from the early days in Denver, Colorado where she and her older brother Tony, were raised by a mother she adored, and a father she describes as “a mean drunk.” It wasn’t an easy road from the Mountain West to Broadway, then to Hollywood and television, but she’s looking back in her new memoir, appropriately titled, “The Third Gilmore Girl.”
Tony Award
Working as a chorus dancer in New York, Bishop recounts how one phone call changed her life. It led to a workshop with Michael Bennett, who was collecting stories from Broadway actors, wanting to know what drew them to the profession. Bishop told her story about her mother who started teaching her ballet, a craft she loved and was good at. Sharing her story at the Bennet workshop inspired the character “Sheila,” whom Bishop brought to life. That story became “At the Ballet,” one of the show’s most memorable numbers with her performance earning her a Tony and a Drama Desk Award.Her Hollywood experience gained her more fans for her portrayal of Jennifer Grey’s mother Marjorie Houseman, in the romantic drama “Dirty Dancing.” Bishop recounts that she wasn’t the original actress for the role and was asked to fill in when the lead became ill as production began.
Her successful run of classic roles didn’t end there. In 2000, when writer Amy Sherman-Palladino was looking for the actress to portray the “moneyed matriarch” of the Gilmore family, mother to Lorelai and grandmother to Rory, Bishop became the third Gilmore Girl. Of casting Bishop, Sherman-Palladino shares the difficult and long process in finding the right actress for the role. “We’ve been sitting in this grim room for weeks,” she writes in the Foreword. And, as they prepare for the next round of auditions, “The door opens—and then she walked in.” Bishop’s “whiskey voice and perfect ... timing” was exactly what they were looking for.
Emily Gilmore
About her role as Emily Gilmore, the third Gilmore Girl, she shares, it was “an adventure that would last longer, mean more to me, and accompany me through more off-screen life changes than I could ever have imagined.” Working with the Broadway legend and fellow Tony Award winner Ed Herrmann, and the two actresses who would play the other Gilmore Girls, Lauren Graham and Alexis Bledel, gave Bishop a role she loved. To top it off, the show had brilliant writing, she says, and complicated characters.
When a spot was found on his lung, Leonard endured health issues that would plague him for the rest of his life. Though the spot was removed and with a good prognosis, Leonard continued to face more cancer problems, with Bishop scheduling work assignments around his treatments and hospital stays.
It’s here that Bishop writes with poignancy and pain, about the eventual loss of her real-life husband in 2018, but also the sudden death four years earlier of Herrmann, her on-screen husband for the seven “Gilmore Girls” seasons.
In the years since Herrmann’s death, Bishop continues to work and has appeared in other Sherman-Palladino shows, and the highly anticipated return of “Gilmore Girls” in the form of four hour-and-a-half episodes, where Emily, widowed herself, must continue without her longtime partner by her side. Her deep friendship with Sherman-Palladino has given Bishop more TV roles, in the short-lived but popular “Bunheads,” and a few guest appearances on “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel,” which ran from 2017 to 2023. Of Bishop, Sherman-Palladino writes, “She will be in my next show. And my next.”
Moving On
We learn of Bishop’s love of rescued animals, her favorite roles, a dabble into the psychic realm after losing Leonard, and a health issue that kept Bishop, who continues to do her ballet exercises, in the hospital and recovering for months.Now 80, Bishop has embraced this phase and is grateful for all the lucky breaks she’s had and the people she’s met. In her final chapter, she shares the story of being an audience member during a performance of “Hamilton.”
“They honored the fortieth anniversary of ‘A Chorus Line’ by inviting the original cast to the show,” she says. One of the “Hamilton” dancers caught her eye, someone who showed real talent and charisma. Rather than feel regret at her early years and moan about “that used to be me up there,” Bishop made a point to speak to the dancer, remind her to enjoy this moment and keep pursuing her goals. It gave the author the opportunity to “pass the torch.”
Closing the book on “The Third Gilmore Girl” is like leaving a conversation with a wise and wisecracking elder. Bishop leaves her readers with some of the mantras that she lives by, and just like a dancer, she prefers thinking more about the times she got up than about the times she fell.
