Tracey Ullman

In her three-hour-and-fifteen-minute interview Tracey Ullman talks about growing up in England and how she started doing impersonations as a kid. She discusses attending a performing arts school starting at the age of 12, leaving school at 16 to be a dancer in Berlin, and how she made the transition into acting. She details how she came to be cast in the improvised play Four in a Million and how that led to her being cast on a BBC sketch comedy show. She talks about her years as a pop star and meeting her husband, the late producer Allan McKeown, and moving to America. Ullman goes into detail on the creation of The Tracey Ullman Show, including how it began with meeting James L. Brooks, her concept for the show, and the casting process. She then shares stories from the run of The Tracey Ullman Show, with a discussion of a typical workweek, specific characters she created for the series, including “Kay Clark” and “Ginny Tilman,” winning Emmy awards for the series, and its eventual end and legacy. Ullman then moves on to her special Tracey Ullman: A Class Act and how that led to her HBO show Tracey Takes On… For Tracey Takes On… she talks about specific characters, directing episodes of the series, and the show’s writing team. She then talks about her next series, Tracey Ullman’s State of the Union, including why she decided to feature more impressions of celebrities and public figures and on getting more political in her work. Ullman discusses her then-most recent series Tracey Ullman’s Show, talking about sketches that went viral and the characters she’s carried throughout her series. She concludes by sharing how she gets into character, her writing process and how she collaborates with other writers, how the industry has changed since she started out, advice to aspiring performers, her proudest career achievement, and how she would like to be remembered. Jenni Matz conducted the interview in partnership with the American Comedy Archives at Emerson College on January 30, 2020 in North Hollywood, CA.