Long before she ever took on the now-iconic role of Emily Gilmore in Amy Sherman-Palladino’s beloved comedy-drama “Gilmore Girls,” Kelly Bishop had a stunning résumé. From the mid-1960s and on, Bishop appeared in numerous Broadway shows, earning a Tony Award for her performance as Sheila in the first iteration of “A Chorus Line.” In the ’80s, she appeared as Frances “Baby” Houseman’s mother in “Dirty Dancing” and in subsequent years lit up daytime television on “One Life to Live” and “All My Children.
” For all her career highs, however, Bishop likely will remain best known for her cutting and complex performance as the moneyed New England matriarch in “Gilmore Girls” from 2000 to 2007 — a period she chronicles beautifully in her new memoir, “The Third Gilmore Girl.” In candid and down-to-earth prose, Bishop, 80, looks back at her early years as a trained ballet dancer, moving to New York and entering the Broadway scene (then under her birth name Carole Bishop), auditioning for Woody Allen’s one-act play “Central Park West,” transitioning to film in Paul Mazursky’s 1978 Oscar-nominated drama “An Unmarried Woman” and meeting Sherman-Palladino, with whom she continued to work on “Bunheads” and “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.
” “There was no pretense about [Sherman-Palladino], no slickness, no political glad-handing or equivocating,” Bishop writes in her book. “Just a woman who knew the value of her work and the qua.