‘I was always the sexy tootsie’: Kelly Bishop on Broadway hits, Gilmore Girls – and how to do the Dirty Dancing lift

Kelly Bishop, the majestic Broadway hoofer beloved for playing an immaculate matriarch on TV’s Gilmore Girls, has a memoir out. It’s a brisk and bright 244 pages but if you want the really short version, her life story can be found in a single song, At the Ballet, which was performed by Bishop in A Chorus Line. Its lyrics – about finding a childhood refuge in dance, where “graceful men lift lovely girls in white” – came from a legendary all-night discussion in which she and other dancers spoke intimately about their careers. This marathon confession was the origin of A Chorus Line, the hit 1975 musical conceived by director Michael Bennett.

Bishop had been in chorus lines for over a decade and was about to turn 30 when she joined that gathering, presided over by Bennett, one Saturday night in New York. The dancers – some unemployed (including Bishop) and others hotfooting it from various curtain falls – came together to talk about the nitty-gritty behind the razzle-dazzle.

“It was kind of mysterious,” she says of that session, speaking by phone from her home in New Jersey. It’s the end of the day and it has taken a few attempts to get through. “I apologise from the bottom of my heart,” she says, aghast. “I’ve been scampering around, trying to unpack a suitcase.” Should I ring back? “No, no, no – please stay on the line!” Back to that Saturday night: 26 January 1974. “We sat in a great circle and kept going all night, learning extraordinary things about each other. When we wandered out, it was getting light. Church bells were ringing. We were in a kind of state, almost as if we had been on a spaceship and had just landed on Earth.”

One of Broadway’s biggest successes, A Chorus Line ran for 15 years and won a Pulitzer prize and nine Tony awards, including one for Bishop. The Tonys ceremony was held at the Shubert theatre, where Bishop had danced and where A Chorus Line was playing. Gliding up to the stage to collect her award, blue scarf trailing behind her, she beamed and declared: “Welcome to my theatre!”

The musical used the charged scenario of a New York audition to explore dancers’ highs, lows, hopes and fears, as expressed by all those performers that night. “We’d done shows together and had more superficial conversations,” Bishop says. “But this was a really amazing lesson in other people’s lives.” She opened up about her father’s affairs, her mother telling her she’d be “diff’rent” rather than pretty, and the joy of taking dance classes. At the Ballet, sung by Bishop’s character Sheila as part of a trio, kept those details “and made them into, I think, the prettiest song in the show”.

A Chorus Line considers how to succeed in a cutthroat business. What does Bishop think it takes? “Love of what you’re doing, period.” Plus a certain attitude: “You’re not stopping me, I know I’m good.” And coming to terms with knockbacks: “Even when you’re good, there’s going to be rejection. You have to say, ‘That’s not going to stop me.’”

She remembers the dread of auditions. “I would carry scripts away and do a much better audition on the bus home. One day, I thought, ‘You’re just tormenting yourself!’ And I started, when no one was looking, throwing the pages away in the nearest wastebasket after the audition. It was a little arrogant but a way of letting it go.” Now 80, Bishop no longer tries out for roles. “After 60 years in this business, they know what I can do. They know what I look like, what I sound like. If they think I can do the role, give it to me. If they’re not too sure, give it to somebody else. It’s fine!”

Auditions punctuate the memoir, which is called The Third Gilmore Girl, most powerfully her unsuccessful attempt, aged 18, to get into American Ballet Theatre (ABT). This was “the dream I’d been preparing for since I was eight”. Bishop grew up in Denver, Colorado, and was given ballet lessons at home by her mother, whose high-arched feet she had happily inherited. “It was in the basement of our house, on the linoleum floor, and of course there was no barre. We held on to the backs of chairs. I glommed on to it right away. Then she realised she had to find me a professional school to go to. Amazingly, that’s just about the time ABT opened a branch in Denver.”

When Bishop’s teachers there, Dimitri and Francesca Romanoff, relocated to San Jose in California, her mum – newly divorced – moved the family there. Bishop then went to New York expressly to audition for ABT but didn’t make it. She found work instead with Radio City Music Hall’s corps de ballet, overshadowed by the hotspot’s better-known Rockettes.

A Chorus Line helped her swap dancing for acting, as she’d hoped, but Bishop found herself typecast. “I was always the sexy tootsie. I mean, she wasn’t chic, but if the husband had a girlfriend on the side, that would be me. She was never a mom. The first mom role I played was in Dirty Dancing.”

As Marjorie Houseman, mother of impressionable Baby and insufferable Lisa in the 1987 film, Bishop deployed the pursed smile and raised eyebrow that would become her signature as grandmother Emily on Gilmore Girls. But she had originally signed up for Dirty Dancing to play the minor role of a married guest at the Catskills resort who has eyes for the dance instructor, played by Patrick Swayze. Having spent “about a minute and a half” learning her lines, she arrived on set – and was immediately given the chance to take over the part of Marjorie.

“That switcheroo was so bizarre that I thought I really must do this,” she says. While she found the mother a boring role, she has happy memories of the shoot. Still, the film’s success surprised her. “First of all, we thought the title was really stupid. What is ‘dirty dancing’? Actually, there were some good little stories in there, a wonderful love story, but we still didn’t think it was going to be very good. Then they put the music in – including that last song we all love.”

Was it fun to watch the finale, where Swayze and Jennifer Grey do the big lift for (I’ve Had) The Time of My Life? “I actually learned that lift,” she says. “It was long before Dirty Dancing. I got with a dancer I’d known in Vegas. We were working on a show and, after rehearsals, he taught me to do it. Unfortunately, the choreographer happened to come back to the theatre to get something and he saw us doing that. And he was so angry because it was not a lift I was supposed to be doing. He said, ‘If you hurt yourself …’ He laid into me – but I learned the lift!” She talks through how difficult it is: “Get those legs up, pull your upper body up, get the balance right – you’re just being held on to by your hip bones.”

Dirty Dancing meant Bishop went from “tootsies” to wealthy matriarchs. “At least you get to wear really nice clothes,” she says. That was certainly the case with Emily Gilmore, whose Chanel suits hide “her deep hurt and vulnerability” according to the series’ creator Amy Sherman-Palladino. Emily’s combative Friday night dinners with her daughter Lorelai and granddaughter Rory give the series some of its funniest moments. Emily is a triumphant creation, her tongue as sharp as her suits, although Bishop can quote few of her lines as she only watched each episode once.

When she read the pilot, she found connections with her family. “I saw my relationship with my mother in Rory and Lorelai – my mother and I were pals.” Like Lorelai, Bishop’s grandmother had a baby when she was 16 and wasn’t married. The series led her to understand the women in her life more deeply.

Bishop, who credits her mother with a disarming honesty, is remarkably candid in the memoir about her own “dubious roster” of exes, a first husband who “pretty much cleaned me out, emotionally and financially” and her happy second marriage, for almost 40 years, to TV host Lee Leonard, who died in 2018. (Bishop’s home answerphone still goes through to his cordial voice recording for them.)

Her frustration with the industry’s double standards and sexism throughout her career is clear in the book. The memoir also has a powerful section about a pro-choice rally that Bishop attended to show her gratitude and support for Planned Parenthood who had “been there for me” when she had an abortion in her mid-30s. She chose to talk about it in response to Roe v Wade being overturned in 2022 by the Supreme Court. “Who I started calling the Inferior Court,” she says. “I was so offended and so upset about that for my little sisters, the young women of America.” She is buoyant about the prospect of a Kamala Harris presidency. “I love hearing her talk, and would love to have four years of seeing that beautiful smile.”

Our interview time is almost up. There’s a suitcase to be packed and then another for her forthcoming trip to Paris, reuniting with Sherman-Palladino for Étoile, a series about rival ballet companies. Bishop, who calls herself a “raconteuse”, has been so open and affable – I’d half-feared that, like Emily, she wouldn’t suffer fools. Do people ever assume she’ll act like her?

“I don’t associate with high society,” she replies. Some fans may not even recognise her. “I dress like an eight-year-old boy: jeans, T-shirt, baseball cap.” But people are mostly polite, she says. And if not? “The advantage I have in playing Emily is that it will be fairly easy for me to turn around and say, ‘Stop right now. Stop. We’re done.’” That steely tone lifts and I imagine her smiling. “And Emily has spoken!”

• The Third Gilmore Girl is out now