October, already? Today, we’re exploring the legacy of the inimitable Carol Burnett. Then:

• It’s Day One of the government shutdown
• Why so many medicines are off-limits during pregnancy
• Could Donald Trump’s sweeping Gaza peace plan work?

Rachel Syme
A staff writer covering Hollywood.

When I was nine years old, I got the part of Molly, the littlest orphan, in a local Albuquerque production of the musical “Annie,” which follows a ragtag group of girls living in a run-down Manhattan orphanage during the Great Depression. To prepare for the role, I watched John Huston’s 1982 film adaptation of the musical well over a dozen times. I knew that I was supposed to root for Annie, the curly-haired, ever-optimistic protagonist, but I found myself inherently drawn to another redhead onscreen: the comic actress Carol Burnett. At almost fifty years old, Burnett played the film’s villain, Miss Hannigan, the snarling, often drunk house mother of the orphanage who openly resents the girls in her care for both their youth and their rosy idealism. What made Burnett so good in the role—and it is, undoubtedly, one of her best performances—is that she played Miss Hannigan as a bawdy sensualist, who, despite her sorry circumstances, refuses to cut herself off from her desires. She is a shameless flirt, sauntering down the halls in a tattered kimono that reads more bordello than boarding house. She carries herself with the hauteur of a woman who feels entitled to a grand life and would do anything to get it. She’s a mess, but she’s human. She was also very funny. When Burnett sings her big, belty number, “Little Girls,” she hiccups through swills of bathtub gin and wobbles around like a newborn fawn.

Huston’s film began, for me, a decades-long fascination with the work of Burnett, who at ninety-two years old is roundly considered one of our leading legends of American comedy. When “The Carol Burnett Show,” Burnett’s blockbuster variety hour from the sixties and seventies, became available to stream, I mainlined every episode I could find. And when, a little over a year ago, David Remnick texted me “Two words: Carol Burnett,” I couldn’t say yes fast enough. Burnett was (and still is) in the middle of a late-career resurgence. She currently stars in “Palm Royale,” a campy Apple TV+ comedy about a group of scheming socialites in nineteen-sixties Palm Beach. (Burnett plays a grande dame who spends the first few episodes in a coma; and yet, with a few well-placed grunts, she steals every scene she’s in.) Last year, I flew out to California to meet her at her home, and was delighted to find that she is as sharp, funny, and as full of old Hollywood tales as she has ever been.

We spent the past year and a half having conversations—about comedy, about her hardscrabble childhood, about artmaking and longevity—which resulted in the Profile in this week’s issue. Some of our talks happened over dinner. (Burnett always orders a single Cosmopolitan cocktail with her meal.) Some happened via text. Every day, around noon, Burnett texts me her Wordle score. (I am in illustrious company—her other Wordle companions include Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Allison Janney, and Charlize Theron.) She usually wins in two guesses, which has led her friends to wonder if she cheats, but Burnett told me, “I would never!” She added that she is simply incredibly lucky. Still, Burnett’s innate luck (and I learned while reporting that she has had a lot of lucky breaks) is underscored by an extreme work ethic that continues today. I hoped to capture this—along with her joyful, unwavering commitment to silliness.