Career
Bernhard became a popular staple at the Comedy Store. As her popularity as a comedienne grew she was cast as a supporting player on The Richard Pryor Show in 1977. Guest appearances on evening talk shows followed. Her big break came in 1983 when she was cast by Martin Scorsese to star as stalker and kidnapper Masha in the film The King of Comedy for which she won the National Society of Film Critics Award for Best Supporting Actress.
She began performing her first one-woman show called I'm Your Woman in 1985, and an album version was released. Bernhard appeared in a variety of tiny film and television roles throughout the 1980s while crafting her stand-up routine into a more performance art oriented show. She launched an Off Broadway one woman show called Without You I'm Nothing, With You I'm Not Much Better in 1988 which played at the Orpheum Theatre. In 1990 it was turned into a film and a double album of the same name. The film was mostly shot on location in 1989 in the Cocoanut Grove located in the Ambassador Hotel. A frequent guest on David Letterman's NBC program, it was during the run of 'Without You I'm Nothing, With You I'm Not Much Better' that she appeared with her then good friend (and rumored lover) Madonna on the show. The two alluded to their romantic relationship and staged a sexy confrontation. They would continue to be friends for several years, with Bernhard even making an appearance in Madonna's movie Truth or Dare.
Read more about this topic: Sandra Bernhard
Famous quotes containing the word career:
“He was at a starting point which makes many a man’s career a fine subject for betting, if there were any gentlemen given to that amusement who could appreciate the complicated probabilities of an arduous purpose, with all the possible thwartings and furtherings of circumstance, all the niceties of inward balance, by which a man swings and makes his point or else is carried headlong.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)
“Clearly, society has a tremendous stake in insisting on a woman’s natural fitness for the career of mother: the alternatives are all too expensive.”
—Ann Oakley (b. 1944)
“I doubt that I would have taken so many leaps in my own writing or been as clear about my feminist and political commitments if I had not been anointed as early as I was. Some major form of recognition seems to have to mark a woman’s career for her to be able to go out on a limb without having her credentials questioned.”
—Ruth Behar (b. 1956)