INTERVIEW: Renée Taylor remembers her life of dieting in new off-Broadway show
Photo: Renée Taylor stars in her new one-woman show, My Life on a Diet. Photo courtesy of My Life on a Diet press rep / Provided with permission by Coyle Entertainment.
Successful actress Renée Taylor, who played Fran Drescher’s mother on TV’s The Nanny, has more than a few stories to tell about her triumphs and obstacles involving food, dieting and acting in show business. She’ll present these tales in her uniquely comedic way during her new off-Broadway show, My Life on a Diet, which begins performances Thursday, July 12 at the Theatre at St. Clement’s in Midtown Manhattan.
The one-woman show is the brainchild of Taylor and her late husband, Joseph Bologna. The off-Broadway engagement serves as the production’s New York premiere.
“Nora Ephron told me that she remembers her life from what she wore and what everybody wore, and I remember my life from what I ate and what everybody around me was eating because at different moments of my life, I was on a different diet,” Taylor said in a recent phone interview. “I started when I was 4. As a chubby child, I was put on my first diet.”
Throughout Taylor’s rumination on dieting, she mentions the many interesting celebrities she has met along the way. Her long list of show-biz connections is impressive: Marilyn Monroe, Joan Crawford, Marlon Brando and Cary Grant. She has also appeared on Broadway several times, been nominated for an Academy Award for adapting her play Lovers and Other Strangers and won the Emmy Award for writing Acts of Love and Other Comedies.
“Whoever I met I thought if I eat like them, I’ll look like them, like Grace Kelly or Marilyn Monroe or whatever movie star I met,” she said. “I thought that their diet would give me their looks. … The only diet that really works is not to use food as a substitute for the pain in your life.”
Taylor has tried many diets and has hilarious anecdotes about each and every one. This fascination with food and body image goes back to when she was a child.
“When I was 4 years old, my mother told me, ‘You look so pretty,’ because I came in third in [a] … Chubby Child Contest,” she said. “She said, ‘Go next door, and show the neighbors how pretty you look.’ So I went next door, and they slammed the door in my face. And I said, ‘Well, that’s my first show business rejection.’”
Taylor tells these stories with a laugh, but there are serious elements in My Life on a Diet as well. She called the play’s topic very, very painful at times, and the one-woman show offers her a chance to heal and confront the pressure she has put on herself to be thin.
“I lost some jobs because they said they were looking for a thinner person,” she said. “Even Mae West they told to lose weight, and she said to the studio, ‘I thought about it, and I’m not doing it because men like me like this.’ Her weight would never do in Hollywood now, nor maybe would Marilyn’s.”
Fans who see the off-Broadway show, which continues for a limited engagement through Aug. 19, will likely know Taylor from her days on The Nanny, a show that brought her an even larger national audience and Emmy nomination. On the show, the actress played the title character’s mother, a woman who dressed in vibrant colors, was a big flirt and antagonized her daughter to no end. Drescher, the creative force behind the show about a nanny from Queens working for a rich family, is still good friends with Taylor.
“Fran has remained a good friend of mine, and we laugh about it all the time,” Taylor said. “It’s really great that three generations — grandmothers, mothers and their children — all know me. That’s really nice. … They wanted somebody actually who was Presbyterian to play the part of the Jewish mother. … So Fran said, ‘Well, why don’t you just come on as a guest and let the network say, hey, she’d be good as the mother.’ And that’s exactly what happened.”
Standing beside Taylor throughout her personal and professional roles was her husband of many years, Bologna. In fact, My Life on a Diet was his idea, and his name is credited as director and co-writer.
“He said, ‘People are always interested in your weight,’ because I was always eating on The Nanny,” she said. ” I said, ‘Oh, I don’t know if people are going to be interested.’ He says, ‘Men and women are always on a diet,’ so that’s how we started it. It was his idea. We were living in Vermont at the time, and he said why don’t we just start working on that. And so we did. It has sort of evolved into this, but, you know, even though he’s passed away, I feel that he’s still with me. … He was my boyfriend for 53 years.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
My Life on a Diet, starring Renée Taylor, begins performances Thursday, July 12 at the Theatre at St. Clement’s in Midtown Manhattan. Click here for more information and tickets.
