Marcia Wallace

Marcia Wallace has been making people laugh on television for thirty years and while her career includes the long running role as ‘Carol' the receptionist on The Bob Newhart Show and an Emmy winning role as Ms. Krabappel on The Simpsons – 4 of TV Guide's funniest episodes in television history have featured Marcia – her greatest success has been weathering her own stormy life. Note the title, please! This is a life lived out to the edges, dominated by a powerful life force and her big personality. She's been through it all, can share her turbulent life and make us laugh and cry with her along the way. She's a likely successor to the late Erma Bombeck, a down-to-earth wit who can use the stuff of her own experiences to reach American women and become a fixture in their homes. Erma did just that, selling millions of books, writing 4,500 newspaper columns and Marcia Wallace has that same voice. She's another great dame with an eye and ear for our common experience. Marcia was met with some formidable challenges. She tells her story – a story with more than its fair share of sadness – with acceptance and humor. She's learned a lot and learned it the hard way and her story has a meaning for all women but ‘Girlfriends of a Certain Age' will feel especially inspired by Marcia's lack of self-pity and resilience. At the age of 43, Marcia finally meets the love of her life and to her astonishment, he loves her back. On the eve of her wedding, in yet another perverse twist in her life, she is diagnosed with breast cancer and goes on to be a "blushing Buddhist bride". When she and her husband, Denny, fail to get pregnant, they go on the dramatic pilgrimage of love called adoption and end up in the delivery room coaching the birth mother. Finally: Marcia, happy at last. However, when their child is 5, Denny is diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, suffers for 8 months and dies. The latter part of her tale deals with grieving, getting out of debt, menopause, single motherhood, widowhood and all at the same time! Marcia starts to put her new life together only to be sidetracked by a fire that destroys her home. But she hangs in there and at 50, a widow and a single mom in menopause, Marcia wins an Emmy for her tender and hilarious portrayal of Bart Simpson's 4th grade teacher, Mrs. Krabappel. More importantly, she becomes a national spokesperson for breast cancer awareness, going on the road to tell her story of survival and hope.