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The Saturday Night Live
alum brings her brash sense of humor to Mermaid,
recorded live at the Riviera Hotel & Casino in Las
Vegas.
Her hilarious segments include: Sights and Sounds of
My Gym, The Time I Met Oprah and The Problem with
Braids. A
bright, inventive sketch player and comic actor
whose portrayals of such characters as Zoraida, the
in-your-face NBC page, and Queen Shaniqua, the
Afrocentric critic, on four seasons of "Saturday
Night Live" (1991-95) put her on the upward career
tract.
Ellen Cleghorne was
raised in the projects of Brooklyn, and after
earning a degree at Hunter College on Manhattan's
Upper East Side, began performing standup in clubs
throughout New York City. She also performed with
"The Family, Inc.", a troupe which performed mainly
at prisons, and appeared in two productions with the
New York Shakespeare Festival, "Marriage Proposal,"
and "Looking for Tomorrow." Although she had been
featured on several episodes of Keenen Ivory Wayans'
variety series "In Living Color" (Fox) in the early
1990s, Cleghorne was noticed by the producers of
"Saturday Night Live" while performing at a New York
comedy club and was asked to join the show in 1991.
During the course of four seasons, she only created
original characters, but offered dead-on
impersonations of Anita Hill, Whoopi Goldberg, and
singer Natalie Cole, among others. She withdrew from
"SNL" to headline her own sitcom, the short-lived "Cleghorne"
(1995-96), playing a single mother coping with daily
life on the fledgling new network, The WB.
Cleghorne's work in
feature films was slower in getting established. She
made a quick appearance in "Turk 182" (1985), but
did not have a part of substance until Nora Ephron's
"This is My Life" (1992), as a talk show host. She
also had a supporting role in the Ellen DeGeneres
vehicle "Mr. Wrong" (1996).
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