This great star of stage, screen and television turns 66 years old today.

Yes, Rizzo is 66! (My favorite line of her’s in Grease is this: “Sorry French!” My friend Brent can deliver it perfectly.)

But Stockard Channing is so much more than the fabulous Betty Rizzo. She’s a Tony winner with an impressive Broadway resume, a three-time Emmy winner including a win for her role as the First Lady on The West Wing, and she earned an Oscar nomination for best actress for her – in my opinion – best performance ever in Six Degrees of Separation.

Miss Channing, who I’ve had the pleasure of interviewing a few times, has done so many projects with LGBT characters and themes and I want to highlight some of them here: she won the Emmy for her portrayal of Judy Shepard in The Matthew Shepard Story, won a Daytime Emmy for her role in Jack as a mom who helps her son understand why his father (and her husband) left their family for another man, and in The Truth About Jane she played the mother of a lesbian teen who has great difficulty accepting her daughter’s sexuality.

Then there was an Emmy nomination a few years back for terrific sitcom Out of Practice which was criminally canceled after just one season. One of her three children in the show was played by Christopher Gorham who we love and the daughter in the show was an outspoken lesbian played by Paula Marshall.

So whether it’s LGBT themed stuff or just camp like Isn’t She Great and The Girl Most Likely To… Stockard Channing is the bomb! Below is a scene from the 1973 cult fave “Girl Most Likely To” (written by Joan Rivers) starring Stockard as a former ugly duckling who cleverly kills all the people who were mean to her in high school:

Leave a Reply