Ellen DeGeneres
Ellen DeGeneres is an actor, born 1958.
Ellen DeGeneres started in stand-up in the early 1980s and broke nationally with an appearance on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson in 1986. The act was observational and unhurried, built on a conversational drift that kept doubling back on itself, and every screen job she has had since has been an attempt to find a container for it. The sitcom Ellen ran from 1994 to 1998, The Ellen Show followed in 2001, and she has won a Primetime Emmy for comedy writing.
The container that finally fit was the daytime talk show. The Ellen DeGeneres Show ran from 2003 to 2022 and won 33 Daytime Emmy Awards, and it defined her public image for two decades: the dancing, the audience giveaways, the relentless niceness as a brand. In 2021 she announced its end, following multiple allegations of workplace bullying and the internal investigations that followed, and the gap between the brand and the reporting is now part of the story of the show whether anyone likes it or not.
The acting career is smaller than the fame suggests, and it has exactly one great performance in it. Dory in Finding Nemo (2003) and Finding Dory (2016) takes her stand-up rhythm, the interruptions, the tangents, the cheerfulness that will not read a room, and attaches it to a character for whom all of that is a genuine affliction. It is a lovely piece of voice work and a much sadder one than children notice. The live-action films, Mr. Wrong, EDtv, The Love Letter, are minor by comparison; the more interesting screen credit is If These Walls Could Talk 2.
Movies (22)
- Finding Nemo (2003)
- Finding Dory (2016)
- Coneheads (1993)
- Doctor Dolittle (1998)
- Unity (2015)
- EDtv (1999)
- Quentin Tarantino: From a Movie Buff to a Hollywood Legend (2021)
- If These Walls Could Talk 2 (2000)
- Goodbye Lover (1999)
- The Love Letter (1999)
- Carol Burnett: 90 Years of Laughter + Love (2023)
- Mr. Wrong (1996)
- One World: Together at Home (2020)
- Justin Bieber's Believe (2013)
- On the Edge (2001)
- Adele One Night Only (2021)
- Celebrating Betty White: America's Golden Girl (2022)
- Outstanding: A Comedy Revolution (2024)
- Pauly Shore Is Dead (2003)
- TMZ Presents: The Downfall of Diddy (2024)
- The Undefeated (2011)
- The Very Best of America's Funniest Comedians (2003)
TV (24)
- The Ellen DeGeneres Show (2003)
- The Ellen DeGeneres Show (2003)
- American Idol (2002)
- The Tonight Show with Jay Leno (1992)
- Ellen (1994)
- Ellen (1994)
- The Larry Sanders Show (1992)
- People's Choice Awards (1975)
- Live from E! (2002)
- Entertainment Tonight (1981)
- 100 Years of Warner Bros. (2023)
- Inside Comedy (2012)
- My Next Guest Needs No Introduction with David Letterman (2018)
- Patriot Act with Hasan Minhaj (2018)
- One Night Stand (1989)
- Pixar Popcorn (2021)
- The New York Times Presents (2020)
- Best of Ellen (2022)
- Best of Ellen (2022)
- The Ellen Show (2001)
- The Ellen Show (2001)
- Visible: Out on Television (2020)
- The Emmy Awards (1949)
- Larry King Live (1985)
Books (1)
Where to start with Ellen DeGeneres
Finding Nemo is the answer to where to start, and it is not a compromise: Dory is the best thing she has done on screen, and the performance is far more precise than its reputation as comic relief allows. Finding Dory then gives the character a whole film and takes her seriously.
For the stand-up comedian turned sitcom lead, Ellen is the historically important one, and it is worth watching with some sense of when it was made. The Ellen DeGeneres Show is the daytime machine, best sampled rather than binged. The Larry Sanders Show catches her early and playing a version of herself in a show that was excellent at that. Of the film comedies, EDtv is the one that holds up best and Mr. Wrong does not. If These Walls Could Talk 2 is the serious outlier and the one most worth your time after the Pixar films.
The Pixar films
Dory is by a wide margin her best work and the one that will outlast everything else: short-term memory loss played as comedy that turns, in the sequel, into something much closer to grief. Finding Dory gives the character a whole film of her own.
The television
Nineteen seasons of the daytime show and thirty-three Emmys. Ellen, the sitcom, is the historically significant one: the 1997 coming-out episode drew forty-two million viewers and the show was cancelled within a year.
The nineties films
The film career never really took, and these are mostly studio comedies that did not work. Coneheads and EDtv are the ones people remember, and If These Walls Could Talk 2 is the serious one worth finding.