Any list of the silver screen's great comediennes would be incomplete without the presence of the unforgettable Miss Madeline Kahn. A talent out of time, this wisecracking diva might have been a superstar during Hollywood's glamorous heyday, born to star in the kind of all-singing, all-dancing musical extravaganzas they simply didn't make during her 1970s prime.
Instead, often perceived as being too kooky for anything resembling a conventional leading role, she proceeded to joke her way through. Who, after all, could forget Kahn doing her finest Marlene Dietrich as sultry saloon singer Lily von Schtupp in Mel Brooks's classic Blazing Saddles? Gamely sporting one of the screen's great speech impediments, von Schtupp's tour-de-force number I'm Tired will stay with us forever: "Stage-door Johnnies constantly suwwound me / They always hound me, with one wequest. / Who can satisfy their lustful habits? / I'm not a wabbit! / I need some west." A perfect female counterpart to fellow Brooks regular Gene Wilder, she collaborated with Mad Melvin on a string of box-office winners; as well as the aforementioned Blazing Saddles (1974), she stole the show in Young Frankenstein (1974), High Anxiety (1977) and History Of The World Part I (1980).
The other significant cinematic collaborator of Kahn's career was new-wave wunderkind Peter Bogdanovich, who cast her in her feature debut as Ryan O'Neill's uptight fiancée (another Kahn speciality) in knockabout farce What's Up Doc (1972) before guiding her to the first of her two Oscar nominations for Best Supporting Actress in the classic Paper Moon (1973).
Fellow Paper Mooner and future child-star casualty Tatum O'Neill bagged the statue on the night; Bogdanovich and Kahn would again collaborate on the filmmaker's catastrophic musical turkey At Long Last Love, to one of the most hostile responses in the history of cinema.
Madeline Kahn's heart, however, always belonged to the stage. Born in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1942, this natural extrovert trained as a speech therapist and an opera singer before deciding to aim for those bright lights of Broadway; within three years she went from chorus girl in a revival of Kiss Me, Kate to the star turn in New Faces Of 1968, and the movies swiftly came calling. When her film career stalled in the early 1980s, she returned with a vengeance to treading the boards, bagging a rake of meaty roles, among them a Tony Award-winning turn in Wendy Wasserstein's acclaimed play The Sisters Rosenzweig. After years of lightweight TV work, she essayed one last major movie role - as an embittered suburban matriarch in acclaimed indie drama Judy Berlin - before losing a well-publicised battle with ovarian cancer in 1999. "I've been lucky," she said. "I got to live the dream."
Derek O'Connor