Wave Wire Services
HOLLYWOOD — Comedic icon Carol Burnett placed her handprints and footprints in cement in the forecourt of the TCL Chinese Theatre in Hollywood June 20, the latest in a series of honors in her hometown.
Burnett, 91, received the honor in a star-packed ceremony. Among those in attendance were another Hollywood legend — 98-year-old Dick Van Dyke — and stars including talk show host Jimmy Kimmel and Burnett’s castmates in the AppleTV+ comedy “Palm Royale” Laura Dern and Bob Odenkirk. Maya Rudolph and Allison Janney also were in attendance, along with costume designer Bob Mackie, who designed outfits on Burnett’s famed variety show.
Burnett told the crowd how she and her grandmother would often visit the Chinese Theatre when she was growing up.
“This is quite a trip,” she said. “I grew up just a few blocks from here, Yucca and Wilcox, that’s a block north of Hollywood Boulevard. And when I was a little girl, I can’t begin to count the times that my grandmother and I would walk up here to the Grauman’s Chinese, that’s what it was called then, and look at all the footprints and handprints of all these great movie stars. And Betty Grable was one of my favorites, and I remember bending down and putting my hands on her handprints, never dreaming that somebody I’d be putting my hands here — 80 years later.
“I remember also my grandmother and I, when we could afford it — we were poor — but we would occasionally come here to the Chinese. It was first-run, so it was more expensive than the second-run theaters. And we’d come in and we’d see a Betty Grable movie, and then before we’d leave my grandmother would say, ‘Let’s hit the ladies room.’ So we would go in there and steal all the toilet paper. And she said, ‘Well, we’ll be set for another month.’”
Burnett received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1975, was depicted on a mural at her alma mater Hollywood High School completed in 2002 and had the intersection of Highland and Selma avenues, adjacent to Hollywood High School, named after her in 2013.
Burnett was born in San Antonio on April 26, 1933, and moved to Hollywood as a child with her grandmother to a one-room apartment near her mother after her parents divorced and separately moved to Hollywood.
Burnett is best known for the 1967-78 CBS variety show, “The Carol Burnett Show.” She has won three Emmys as a performer, a Grammy for best spoken word album for the audio book for her 2016 memoir about her show, “In Such Good Company: Eleven Years Of Laughter, Mayhem, And Fun In The Sandbox,” and a special Tony Award.
