Molly Shannon

When Molly Shannon started finding success on Saturday Night Live, she remembers feeling depressed. "I realized that really the only person I wanted to say, ...

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When starting out in Hollywood, the “Saturday Night Live” alum used a fake name (Liz Stockwell) and pretended to work for playwright David Mamet. Shannon's pal ...

Shannon played social worker Judy Swain in the 12th episode of Season 2 of “Twin Peaks” in 1991. “We were trying to figure out how we were going to get in the door as actors,” Shannon wrote in her memoir, “ Hello Molly!,” available from HarperCollins on April 12. “They were meeting good, young, up-and-coming actors.” “We went to the American Film Institute library and looked up managers and agents that we thought would be good for us in this big, thick agency book,” Shannon continued. She only appeared in one episode, but the Mamet Scam still proved to work for “about six months” total. Because I would drive my wreck past her casting office and say, ‘Oh, I really want to be on ‘Twin Peaks.’ I love that show!'”

Shannon's new memoir, Hello, Molly! opens with the car crash that killed her mother and sister when Shannon was 4. She says, for a long time, ...

And I said, "When did you know that you were gay?" And I said, "Did Mommy know?" And I was like, "What? What did you just say?" And we ... went and sat in lounge chairs by the pool and I just thought, I'm going to be brave and ask the million dollar question that only a daughter can ask a parent when they're still alive. But he could take us to school, and be home after school, and take me to piano lessons. And I found it fascinating to study her. And he had a walker that he used for the first year to just slowly learn how to walk around her living room. That was really hard because he was in the hospital for a long time and then recuperating at my aunt's. He had to learn how to walk again. And then finally, I think an aunt did tell us that my mom and my sister had died. I get to watch my kids grow up, and my mom didn't get to watch me grow up. But I was like, "Where's my mom?" We had been sleeping in the back of the station wagon and then they took us to the hospital and they cut our clothes off.

The then-unknown actor used a fake name and pretended to work for playwright David Mamet in order to break out in Hollywood.

“We went to the American Film Institute library and looked up managers and agents that we thought would be good for us in this big, thick agency book,” Shannon continued. A few years later, Shannon would become known as one of best players on SNL, known for her chaotic schoolgirl Mary Katherine Gallagher and high-kicking Sally O’Malley. “We were trying to figure out how we were going to get in the door as actors,” said Shannon in her upcoming memoir, Hello Molly. “How were we gonna bust in? Eugene had studied with David Mamet. He was (and is) this giant, hugely successful guy, very respected—a big-time playwright and screenwriter—but Eugene knew that he wasn’t a guy who was in Hollywood much. He just liked staying in Vermont and New York.” 2022 seems to be the year of scammer stories.

Carson Daly and actor Molly Shannon shared how losing a parent when they were both under 6 years old has affected their lives now that they are parents ...

"I think that makes me appreciative of people being alive, and time with people, and just appreciating the time on earth we do have with people." When things got kind of tough, I was like, ‘Well, nothing could be as bad as when I was little,’ so it gave me a certain bounce-ability." Shannon, 57, writes in her new memoir, "Hello Molly!" about the loss of her mother when she was 4 years old.

"The White Lotus" and "Saturday Night Live" star Molly Shannon writes about fending off a horny Gary Coleman, the tragedy of losing her mother, ...

“I feel so lucky,” she writes near the end of the book. The “White Lotus” actress says she was able to flip Coleman off the bed, but he repeatedly tried to kiss her. “We had a great time, laughing and joking,” Shannon recalled, and then Coleman asked if Shannon wanted to see the Presidential Suite where he was staying. “He told me his gay life was mostly limited to occasional blow jobs at bars and truck stops,” she writes, noting that her father was born a generation or two too early. He was going to fall in love. “I was over the moon,” writes Shannon, then an NYU student.