THE THIRD GILMORE GIRL

Unassuming show-biz memoir by Broadway and screen veteran Bishop.

By her account, Bishop—nee Carole, now Kelly because, as it happens with so many actors, “Carole Bishop” was already listed with SAG—has lived a long life with just a few modest scandals: an affair here, a drink or puff too many there. Her best-known credit was courtesy of Amy Sherman-Palladino, who cast her in a role she cherished for years: Lauren Graham’s mother on the beloved TV series The Gilmore Girls, a rule-bound patrician who becomes less uptight as the years roll on. Bishop herself played strictly by the rules, at least on screen: she holds that her job as an actor is "to learn my lines and make them work exactly as written,” with no ad libs allowed, thank you. Her dedication to craft is evident, her credentials undeniable, and if the memoir doesn’t have a lot of interior drama, it’s simply because Bishop kept her nose down and worked. She wasn’t particularly lucky in love until finally meeting her soulmate, living happily until cancer took him, on which she writes, affectingly, “Friends who’ve been right by your side through the crisis head home and get back to their lives as they should.…The silence becomes deafening, and the full force of ugly, excruciating, inescapable grief crashes into you.” Rescuing her from grief was old friend Sherman-Palladino, who brought her in for a brief recurring role in The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. Her agreeable memoir is sprinkled with fun facts, as when she asked Michael Bennett why A Chorus Line (she was in the original cast) was not simply Chorus Line: “Because,” he patiently explained, “when an alphabetical list of Broadway shows is published in newspapers and trade magazines, A Chorus Line will come first.”

Catnip for fans of the title series, and a revealing look at the craft of character acting.