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Courtesy IFA Talent Agency
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Tracey Ullman is one of those rare talents who is nearly impossible to define. James L. Brooks, executive producer of The Tracey Ullman Show, tried to sum her up: “Tracey is damn near unique. Who do we relate her talents to? On the show we kept comparing her to Peter Sellers until we just got sick of it.” Ullman’s talent and versatility have earned her an impressive seven Emmy Awards. Before coming to American television, she was already established as a London stage star and an acclaimed musician with a Top 10 international hit single. Initially noticed by American audiences in 1985 appearing opposite Meryl Streep in the drama Plenty, Ullman cocreated and starred in her first American television series two years later on Fox. In 1996 she wrote, produced, and starred in the HBO hit series Tracey Takes On . . . . In both programs, Ullman completely transformed her appearance, disappearing into a wide array of characters, spanning the spectrum of age, race, and class. A satirist at heart, she has used her characters, which she bases on actual people, to bemusedly comment on social mores and contemporary relationships. Matt Roush wrote in USA Today that Ullman is “the chameleon as comic dynamo.”
Tracey Ullman was born on December 30, 1959, in Slough, England. Her Polish-born father died when Ullman was only six, and her mother raised her along with older sister Pat in the London suburb of Hackbridge. Without a father, the family was constantly under a financial strain. “My mother was always doing strange things like driving parts around for a garage, all covered in oil and paid 10 pounds a week,” Ullman recalled. “But she was very funny, and our defense against hardship was having a great sense of humor.” That humor inspired Ullman to tell jokes and perform as a child for adults. At twelve, she was awarded a scholarship to London’s prestigious Italia Conti Academy of Theatre Arts. However, she dropped out at sixteen to earn a living. “Great pressure is put on kids who don’t have dads to get out and make money, and make life easier for everybody,” Ullman explained.
Ullman’s first professional job was as a dancer in the Berlin stage production of Gigi. Joining the “Second Generation” dance troupe in England, she then landed parts in Grease and The Rocky Horror Show, but yearned to be taken more seriously. Tackling legitimate theater, Ullman performed in the comedy Four In a Million, for which she received the London Theatre Critics Award as Most Promising New Actress. In 1981 she became a household name in England, costarring in the popular BBC series Three of a Kind. Ullman impressed critics by playing a wide array of offbeat characters and often stealing the show with her musical numbers. Ullman fondly recalled the show’s zany humor: “We’d do terrible jokes: ‘I’m just going to run the bath, love,’ and then a bathtub goes across the screen with a leash on it.” She later appeared in a situation comedy, Girls on Top, playing an outrageous gold digger. Throughout her acting career, she conquered the British pop music scene, recording several albums and performing with Paul McCartney in a video for her international hit “They Don’t Know,” as well as his movie Give My Regards to Broad Street.
After appearing in Fred Schepisi’s Plenty with Meryl Streep and Sting, Ullman decided to take a hiatus, settling down in Hollywood with husband Allan McKeown, a British producer. She searched for appropriate projects, while soaking in a variety of American accents and studying such comic masters as Sid Caesar, Carol Burnett, and Ernie Kovacs. Ullman’s compilation tape of her many characters got the attention of legendary producer James L. Brooks, who proclaimed: “I was just startled at the size of the talent. I got chills. Historically, there’s never been anyone quite like her. She does technical things with accents I’d never seen done before by an English actor.” Together they created The Tracey Ullman Show for Fox, an ambitious, idiosyncratic sketch show that ran for four years. Along with Dan Castellaneta and Julie Kavner, today best known as the voices of Homer and Marge Simpson, Ullman and company performed several comedy sketches before an audience, some just a few minutes long, every half-hour episode. The series also spawned The Simpsons, which began as thirty-second shorts sandwiched between sketches. Jerry Lazar noted in the New York Times that the “skitcom is aglow with energy, enthusiasm, creativity and good intentions. It’s smart and clever, hip without being smug. . . . There is, after all, nothing else quite like it on television.”
Ullman displayed an uncanny ability to completely inhabit her characters. She effortlessly changed her face, body, accent, and movements, transforming broad caricatures into specific characters. Based on actual people she's met, Ullman said that each of her characters is “a composite of mannerisms and vocal inflections” she absorbed in her travels. The range was remarkable: from the precocious teenager Francesca to the repressed English secretary Kay to the punk rocker Summer Storm. “It’s her life,” stated Castellaneta. “She’s always observing characters and coming back saying, ‘This is a character I want to do.’ It’s a preoccupation with her. She’s like a painter who goes around with a sketchbook, constantly sketching.”
Ullman appeared in several movies, including I Love You to Death and Robin Hood: Men in Tights and debuted on Broadway in the one-woman show The Big Love before tackling television again. Two specials for HBO, Tracey Ullman: A Class Act and Tracey Takes on New York, gave her more artistic freedom and control over the material. In 1996 she began producing and starring in the HBO series Tracey Takes On . . ., which was shot on location and with nothing off-limits. Each episode was organized around such themes as romance, royalty, and nostalgia, but the abiding motif in all Ullman’s work continued to be the messiness of human relationships. Again Ullman channeled a wide community of characters, notably the macho cabbie Chic, the Long Island neurotic Fern Rosenthal, and the abusive Asian donut shop owner Mrs. Noh Nang Ning. Michael McWilliams of the Detroit News praised Ullman as a contemporary satirist of the highest order: “Not many things are sheer genius, but Tracey Takes On . . . is one of them. . . .She’s genderless, classless and raceless, but full of incisive wit. She may be the most vividly caustic humanist since George Bernard Shaw.” She continues to create specials for HBO, including Trailer Tales, which she directed, a task that Ullman once described as comforting “some neurotic asshole on the set.”
Ullman has always claimed, “I like disguising myself,” and consequently, she is in constant demand for her startling realistic portrayals. She has worked with many internationally acclaimed directors, including Robert Altman, Woody Allen, and Tim Burton. She received an Emmy Award for her guest appearances on Ally McBeal, playing the tough therapist Dr. Tracy Clark. In 2005 she costarred with a comic inspiration, Carol Burnett, in the television adaptation of Once Upon a Mattress. Ullman played Princess Winnifred, the role originated by Burnett Off-Broadway in 1959 and later played on television in 1964.
Ullman readily admits that she has “always been a misfit,” needing to “create my own markets.” She was able to defy the odds when her father died, singing and impersonating her way to the top, leaving a neighborhood where, as she explains, “You are considered a success if you simply make it out of there.” Although she captured audiences in Britain and the United States, Ullman resolutely remains the outsider: “I like being the odd one out in L.A., because if you conform, you become something you hate. I love being the odd one out. It’s not about, ‘Look at me! Look at me!’ It’s about really becoming someone else.” Ullman’s constant and varied success as a performer, writer, and producer has made her a role model for the next generation of comediennes searching for a unique voice.
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