By Carol Burnett

"I received my Equity card in 1959 when I was cast by George Abbot as Princess Winnifred in ONCE UPON A MATTRESS. I was 25 when rehearsals began and turned 26 when performances began. At the time there were white cards for senior performers and pink cards for juniors, just beginning. You had to work your way up to a white card. Since I had the starring role they assumed I was a senior and gave me a white card. They were quite embarrassed when they had to follow-up with me and give me a pink card instead."

Six-time Emmy Award winner Carol Burnett has demonstrated such versatility since ending the 11 year run of the "Carol Burnett Show" that she is now as widely recognized for her dramatic abilities as she is for her comedic and musical talents. Americans fondly consider Carol Burnett a true living legend in entertainment, having bestowed more People's Choice Awards upon her than any other woman in the award show's history. It was recently announced that she will be a 2003 recipient of the Kennedy Honor. Some of her other notable awards include six Emmy Awards, five Golden Globes, the Peabody Award for "Friendly Fire," and the Ace Award for "Between Friends" with Elizabeth Taylor. She has enjoyed the kind of career that most performers are only able to dream of, moving easily from the stage to television, from feature films to films for television, and from variety specials to music and comedy specials.

In August Random House will issue a new trade paperback version of One More Time. What started as a letter to her daughers as a record of Carol's life and their family history turned into the critically acclaimed memoir, which reached the non-fiction bestseller lists in 1986. Carol has written a new afterword for this ediiton.

In April 2002 HOLLYWOOD ARMS, directed by Harold Prince, had its world premiere at Chicago's Goodman Theatre. Carol's daughter, Carrie Hamilton, who died in January of that year, conceived the idea for turning the book into a play. Carrie and Carol co-wrote the script based on One More Time. The production went on to its Broadway debut at The Cort Theater on October 31, 2002.

Carol's last special, "The Carol Burnett Show: Show Stoppers" with Harvey Korman, Vicki Lawrence and Tim Conway attracted nearly 30 million viewers. It was the forth most watched program of 2001. It was nominated for three Emmy's including "Outstanding Variety, Music of Comedy Special."

Carol last appeared on Broadway in 1999 in the Stephen Sondheim musical review PUTTING IT TOGETHER; the production was first mounted in 1998, to great critical and commercial success, at Los Angeles' Mark Taper Forum. Her Broadway appearance, prior to "Putting It Together," was in 1995 with Philip Bosco in the Ken Ludwig farce "Moon Over Buffalo." Best Actor In A Play Tony Award nominations were bestowed on both Carol and Philip for their performances in the hit show.

In 1996 Carol began her much acclaimed appearances as Jamie Buchman's (Helen Hunt) mother on NBC's "Mad About You," for which she won an Emmy for Outstanding Guest in a Comedy series. The episodes, which were among the series' highest rated, continued into the 1997 season. 1994 was a busy year for Carol. She produced two specials for CBS, "Men, Movies & Carol," which spoofed the cinema and guest starred Tony Bennett, Scott Bakula, Michael Jetter and Barry Bostwick; and "Carol Burnett: The Special Years," featuring the most memorable moments from nine of her specials. "Seasons of the Heart," a dramatic telefilm on NBC, in which she co-starred with George Segal and Malcolm McDowell, also aired that year.

Carol spent most of her childhood in a less-than-glamorous section of Hollywood and attended UCLA before heading to New York. It was a rough beginning as jobs were tough until Carol staged her own musical revue, featuring her out-of-work roommates from a theatrical boarding house performing material by unemployed writers and composers. Soon offers for summer stock and 13 weeks' work on Paul Winchell's TV show followed. Shortly thereafter, while performing at The Blue Angel in New York, she was spotted by talent bookers from both "The Jack Paar Show" and "The Ed Sullivan Show." Television audiences of both shows were doubled over with laughter at Carol's now-legendary rendition of "I Made a Fool of Myself Over John Forester Dulles."

After guest spots on Garry Moore's morning TV show of the time, Carol went on to make an appearance on the evening telecast of "The Garry Moore Show." During the first year of "Garry Moore Show," she simultaneously performed the lead role in the off-Broadway musical, ONCE UPON A MATRESS. The show was an instant hit and later moved on to Broadway.

The first of her several specials with Julie Andrews followed, "Julie and Carol at Carnegie Hall," an hour musical show on CBS. Juggling both Broadway and television, Carol starred on the stage in FADE OUT, FADE IN, and in a number of televised specials, including "Carol & Company," with Robert Preston; a 90-minute version of "Once Upon a Mattress"; an original musical CALAMITY JANE; "Carol +2" with Lucille Ball and Zero Mostel, and "Carol & Company" with Rock Hudson. In 1967, Carol returned to Los Angeles to begin what would become the longest-running musical comedy variety show in television history: the Emmy-winning "The Carol Burnett Show."

Although the 11-year run of "The Carol Burnett Show" kept her extremely busy, she managed to find time to headline in Las Vegas with friend Jim Nabors as well as make her stage debut in a non-musical, PLAZA SUITE, at the Huntington Hartford Theatre in Los Angeles. She starred in another legit outing, SAME TIME NEXT YEAR with Dick Van Dyke and then the Gower Champion-directed production of I DO, I DO! with Rock Hudson. Her second Julie Andrews special followed, "Julie and Carol at Lincoln Center," along with starring roles in the feature films "Pete 'N Tillie" with Walter Matthau and "The Front Page" again with Matthau and Jack Lemmon. During the 1973-74 season, while still doing "The Carol Burnett Show," she co-starred with Alan Alda in "6 RMS RIV VU" on CBS and the following year portrayed four characters in a 90-minute special television presentation of George Furth's comedy/drama, "Twigs." Teaming with opera star Beverly Sills in "Sills & Burnett at the Met," which aired during the 1976-77 season, Carol won a Christopher Award.

Carol has also starred in a variety of film and television projects since she made the conscious decision to bring "The Carol Burnett Show" to an end in 1978, after the series won a total of 25 Emmy Awards and while it was still enormously popular. Other productions include the critically acclaimed and highly rated musical special "Julie and Carol: Together Again" and the 1998 telefilm "The Marriage Fool" in which she again co-starred with Walter Matthau. In recognition of this vast body of television accomplishments, The National Association of Broadcasters inducted her into their prestigious Hall of Fame.

Additional feature films include "The Four Seasons, "Chu Chu and the Philly Flash," "Annie," and two films directed by Robert Altman, "Health" and "A Wedding," for which she won the San Sebastian Film Award as Best Actress. Her most recent film credit is the starring role, opposite Michael Caine and Christopher Reeve, in the adaptation of the hilarious British stage farce, "Noises Off," directed by Peter Bogdanovich.

Home audiences saw her in such television movies as "The Grass is Always Greener Over the Septic Tank," "Friendly Fire," for which she received an Emmy nomination, "The Tenth Month," as well as the HBO films "Between Friends" with Elizabeth Tayhor and "The Laundromat," directed by Robert Altman. Other television specials include "Dolly and Carol in Nashville" with Dolly Parton, "Burnett/Discovers/Domingo" with Placido Domingo and a two-hour ABC presentation of Neil Simon's play "Plaza Suite", which she had performed on stage in Los Angeles. In 1991 she hosted two highly acclaimed CBS specials, "The Very Best of the Ed Sullivan Show," and her own "The Carol Burnett Show: A Reunion," two of the network's highest rated shows during the season.

Carol never lost her love of performing before a live audience and since 1990, she has appeared in numerous productions of LOVE LETTERS, starring opposite such leading men as Leslie Nielsen Tony Roberts, Charlton Heston, Tom Selleck, Brian Dennehy and Cliff Robertson. She returned to musical comedy in the 1993 Long Beach Civic Light Opera productions of FROM THE TOP! (an original musical written especially for Carol by long-time collarborators and friends Ken and Mitzie Welch) and Stephen Sondheim's COMPANY.

Carol's social and charitable endeavors are legion. She has donated scholarships to her old alma mater, UCLA, on whose board of trustees she serves and where she has established "The Carol Burnett Musical Theater Competition."

In addition to UCLA, Carol has also contibuted to scholarship funds at the University of Hawaii for ethics in journalism, and created scholarship funds for performers at Boston's Emerson College and The College of Santa Fe. Carol continues to give without hesitiation to numerous charities, always remembering that she has been generously given to as well.

Carol Burnett has indeed done much to be proud of; however, her sources of greatest pride are her three daughters, Carrie Hamilton, Jody Hamilton, and Erin Hamilton.