Sophia Michaels
“It’s just wonderful.”
Carol Burnett is turning 90, but she doesn’t feel it inside. “I feel like I’m 11!” the comedic legend tells Page Six exclusively in a new interview. To celebrate her milestone birthday, Burnett is set to be feted with a TV special titled “Carol Burnett: 90 Years of Laughter + Love,” which was filmed last month and airs Wednesday, April 26 on NBC.
Burnett is best known for “The Carol Burnett Show,” which aired on CBS from 1967 to 1978. The variety show also starred Vicki Lawrence, Harvey Korman, Tim Conway and Lyle Waggoner and featured costumes by Bob Mackie. Sadly, Burnett doesn’t think the groundbreaking show would be able to air today. “I don’t think a network would go for what we did,” she tells us. “We had a 28-piece live orchestra, we had 12 dancers, we had two guest stars a week and Bob Mackie designed — get this — 60 to 75 costumes a week, everything everybody wore in all the sketches and all the musical numbers, on and on and on. And no network today would spend that kind of money. The money that it would cost today would be astronomical. So they’re not gonna go for it. And they, you know, they feel that variety is dead, which I don’t believe it is.”
Burnett has unbelievably had two different people change the trajectory of her life. The first was an anonymous benefactor who paid her tuition to go to UCLA in the 1950s. The second was a man who saw Burnett perform a musical comedy sketch at a party while she was attending college and asked her what she wanted to do with her life. When the Texas native replied that she wanted to go to New York and do musical comedy but could not afford it, the man came back with a proposition. He lent her $1,000 and told her to pay it back within five years if she could, and to help other people out if she was successful. Burnett was able to pay him back within the five years and has never revealed his name.
Despite entering her ninth decade, Burnett is not showing any signs of slowing down. She appeared in the final season of “Better Call Saul” last year and filmed
