Julia Sweeney

Diagnoses

Passions

Vocation

Family

American actress and comedienne, a player on "Saturday Night Live." Best known for her portrayal of the androgynous character "Pat" which she brought to the screen in her self-written film "It's Pat." Her second movie, "Julia Sweeney's God Said, Ha!" related her troubles with cancer. Sweeney, the daughter of a federal prosecutor and a homemaker, is the eldest of five children and was raised in Spokane. After graduating the University of Washington, she headed for Los Angeles in 1986 as a member of the comedy troupe "Groundlings" and eventually moved to New York to play in the cast of comedy show "Saturday Night Live." It was there she introduced her signature character "Pat." Feeling "woefully underused" as an actress and comedienne on the show, she left in 1994 to pursue a film career. That same year her brother was diagnosed with cancer of the lymph nodes, and Sweeney immediately put her career on hold to nurse him through his debilitating illness. Several days before his death she informed him that she, too, had been diagnosed with cancer of the cervix. When her brother replied she had developed "sympathy cancer," she took her angst into her comedy. In the Spring of 1994, while the trouper comedienne was performing stand-up once a week in Los Angeles, she underwent two surgeries and nine weeks of intense radiation, honing her routine into a one woman show the following year, "Julia Sweeney's God Said, Ha!" which opened on Broadway in 1996 and was made into a film in 1999. Sweeney's marriage to TV writer Stephen Hibbert ended in divorce. When considering her future, she looks at the bright side. "My chances of recurrence are near zero...I've been meeting with TV writers about possible projects. But even if nothing pans out, I'll be okay. I used to be spastically ambitious and obsessed with work. Now I'm taking an easier view of things. After all I've been through, life doesn't seem like such a race anymore." Link to Wikipedia biography