Biography
Another
Saturday Night Live cast member who has taken her act to the big screen, Molly Shannon is probably best known to TV and film audiences as Mary Katherine Gallagher, the hapless, armpit-sniffing Catholic school girl she originated on
SNL and then brought to multiplexes everywhere as the heroine of
Superstar.
Born in Shaker Heights, a posh suburb of Cleveland, on September 16, 1964, Shannon developed a proclivity for performing at an early age and dreamt of being famous. After receiving a Catholic school education, she earned a B.F.A. in drama from NYU's Tisch School of the Arts, Circle in the Square Studio. Armed with her diploma, she headed West to L.A., where she proceeded to struggle in relative poverty and almost complete obscurity for the next nine years. Although she occasionally found bit parts in film and on such TV series as
Seinfeld, Shannon mainly supported herself with odd jobs and waitressing. Finally, in 1994, she got her big break when she won a spot on
Saturday Night Live. After making her debut during the 1995 season, Shannon became exceedingly popular with audiences, thanks to her impersonations of the likes of Monica Lewinsky, and
Courtney Love.
In 1998, Shannon joined fellow
SNL cast members
Will Ferrell and
Chris Kattan to appear in the disastrous
A Night at the Roxbury; the following year, she brought her own alter ego to the screen in
Superstar. The film earned drastically mixed reviews, although it did fare somewhat better than any number of other
SNL film adaptations. Also in 1999, Shannon played
Drew Barrymore's newsroom colleague in
Never Been Kissed and had a supporting role alongside
Robert De Niro,
Billy Crystal, and
Lisa Kudrow in
Analyze This. She subsequently starred alongside
Jim Carrey in
Ron Howard's 2000 screen adaptation of The Grinch Who Stole Christmas. ~ Rebecca Flint Marx, All Movie Guide