Kathy Griffin

Kathy Griffin is an American comedian, actress, writer, and TV personality whose four-decade career has produced multiple defining American TV-comedy roles — particularly her six-season lead role on Bravo's reality TV series My Life on the D-List (2005–2010), for which she won two Primetime Emmy Awards (2007 and 2008 for Outstanding Reality Program). She was born Kathleen Mary Griffin on November 4, 1960, in Oak Park, Illinois. Her father John Patrick Griffin was an Irish-American electronic-business executive at the Zenith Radio Corporation, and her mother Mary Margaret Patricia Corbally was an Irish-American homemaker.

Her education at the Los Angeles Lee Strasberg Theatre Institute (1978; without earning a degree) launched her early-career path. Her 1978–1990 career across multiple Los Angeles improv-comedy theaters — particularly The Groundlings improv-comedy theater (alongside fellow Groundlings members Lisa Kudrow, Phil Hartman, and Conan O'Brien) — produced her early-career American improv-comedy public profile.

Her 1996–2000 supporting role as Vicki Groener on NBC's sitcom TV series Suddenly Susan (alongside Brooke Shields and Judd Nelson) launched her late-1990s American TV-comedy public profile. Her 2005–2010 lead role on Bravo's reality TV series My Life on the D-List — a six-season cinéma vérité depiction of her ongoing pursuit of A-list celebrity status — produced her 2000s and 2010s American TV-comedy public profile. The series produced her 2007 and 2008 Primetime Emmy Awards for Outstanding Reality Program.

Her later biographical narrative across the 2010s and 2020s has been complicated by her May 30, 2017 photograph holding a fake severed head depicting U.S. President Donald Trump (taken by photographer Tyler Shields and posted by Griffin on social media as a political-protest photograph) — which produced her firing from her CNN New Year's Eve TV-host position, multiple subsequent comedy-tour cancellations, and a U.S. Secret Service investigation. Her September 2021 lung-cancer diagnosis and her subsequent late-2021 lung-removal surgery shaped her late-career biographical narrative. She married American technology executive Matt Moline in 2001 (divorced 2006); she married American marketing executive Randy Bick in 2020 (divorced 2024).

Her name Kathy derives from the English diminutive of Katherine (from the Greek Aikaterinē meaning "pure"). Kathy was a popular American girls' name through the 1950s and 1960s.