An irrepressible “Jill of All Trades,” British actress Tracey Ullman is master of all of them. Winning an arts scholarship at age 12, Ullman worked as a professional dancer with a German ballet company before channelling her energies into musical comedy. For her work in the West End production Four in a Million, Ullman was honored with the London Theatre Critics’ award as Most Promising New Actress of 1981. Two years later, she was presented with a British Academy Award for her efforts on BBC Television. While still in her early twenties, she headlined her own British comedy/variety TV series, Three of a Kind, and climbed the pop-music charts with her singles “You Broke My Heart in 17 Places” and “They Don’t Know.” After an inauspicious film debut in 1984’s Give My Regards to Broad Street, Ullman ascended to film stardom in such productions as Plenty (1985), Jumpin’ Jack Flash (1986), I Love You to Death (1990), Death Becomes Her (1992), and I’ll Do Anything (1994). In 1987, she launched… read more
An irrepressible “Jill of All Trades,” British actress Tracey Ullman is master of all of them. Winning an arts scholarship at age 12, Ullman worked as a professional dancer with a German ballet company before channelling her energies into musical comedy. For her work in the West End production Four in a Million, Ullman was honored with the London Theatre Critics’ award as Most Promising New Actress of 1981. Two years later, she was presented with a British Academy Award for her efforts on BBC Television. While still in her early twenties, she headlined her own British comedy/variety TV series, Three of a Kind, and climbed the pop-music charts with her singles “You Broke My Heart in 17 Places” and “They Don’t Know.” After an inauspicious film debut in 1984’s Give My Regards to Broad Street, Ullman ascended to film stardom in such productions as Plenty (1985), Jumpin’ Jack Flash (1986), I Love You to Death (1990), Death Becomes Her (1992), and I’ll Do Anything (1994). In 1987, she launched her American TV career with the Fox Network’s weekly The Tracey Ullman Show, a superb showcase for her many offbeat characterizations, including mixed-up teen Francesca, selfish yuppie Sara Downey, repressed spinster Kay, and Goodallesque anthropologist Ceci Beckwith. The Tracey Ullman Show not only won the Fox Network its first Emmy nomination, but also spawned the popular cartoon series The Simpsons, which first took shape as a series of between-the-acts animated vignettes. While the show indeed served well to earn the wildly versatile actress a loyal stateside fanbase, it was her 1996 Emmy-winning HBO series Tracey Takes On… that truly allowed Ullman the chance to cut loose in front of the camera. A freewhelling comedy smorgasbord that allowed Ullman the opportunity to tackle a different topic each week, Tracey Takes On… continued to give testament to its star’s remarkable knack for character play. Later branching out with roles in such popular television series’ as Ally McBeal and Will and Grace, Ullman proved that she was as capable of livening up the material of others as she was of creating her own. Supporting roles in such features as Panic and Woody Allen’s Small Time Crooks kept the energetic player busy on the big screen, and in 2004 she would take the lead as an uptight suburban mom transformed into a insatiable sex-addict by a head concussion
in director John Waters’ raunchy comedy A Dirty Shame. Voice work in The Cat That Looked LIke a King, Corpse Bride, and Kronk’s New Groove found Ullman flexing her vocal chords to impressive effect in late-2004 and early-2005, and after taking a trip to the land of fairytales in the made for television production of Once Upon a Mattress, it was time to step into the role of the mischevous Mother Mature in director Amy Heckerling’s 2006 romantic comedy I Could Never Be Your Woman. —allmovie guide
