Although Liz Torres initially gained notoriety as a comedian, it soon became apparent that she has skills that went beyond humor. With that in mind, it should come as no surprise that the New Yorker moved to music and film, developing into a serious talent.
Torres gained a lot of notoriety nowadays thanks to her portrayal of Miss Patty on Gilmore Girls. The actress has undergone a significant shift over the past several years, which has resulted in a significant weight loss.
This is all there is to know about Liz Torres and how she looks now that she has lost weight.
Born on September 27, 1947, Liz Torres. Her mother wanted her to lead a completely different life until she discovered her love for show business. She was raised in the Bronx in New York City. It was the worst counsel Liz had ever received, in her opinion.
“‘Be a bank teller,’” Torres recalled her mother instructing her in an interview with the Chicago Tribune. “She had a fantasy of me working in a bank. That was her immigrant dream, the ultimate goal.”
“People who knew me in high school thought I was: A strange bird. I didn’t speak English very well, and my mother was very strict,” the Puerto Rican-American added. “I always wanted to be like an American, and I never really felt like that until now, I always felt like an immigrant.”
Liz went through primary and secondary school in New York City. As she moved on into high school, her interests and dreams for the future started to form. She began to love drama classes, and performed in several productions in high school. Through this, her love for show business was born.
She originally intended to be a dancer, but she was unable to earn a living off of dancing due to early arthritis. After graduating, Torres started working right away. However, she had developed a strong interest in acting and was a skilled musician. Torres enrolled in the Manhattan School of Music but left early to enroll at NYU.
She developed a greater interest in comedy there. She was now interested in making a living at it.
“I was very serious about anything until an old Vaudeville-styled comic named Phil Foster, who was on the Tonight Show all the time, ran into me at a party. He said, ‘You’re very funny. You should do standup!’ I thought he was nuts. I said, ‘No, my English is not strong.’ He said, “You’re very funny. I’ll teach you how to write,” Torres recalled.
“So, he taught me how to write comedy. I wrote a little nightclub act, and he worked on it with me and took me to Improvisation in New York, which was a little nightclub. I got up and had my first laugh, and I became a laugh [prostitute].”
Liz had therefore discovered her interest in humor. After that, she started showing up for auditions at other improvisation clubs in New York City, but due to her limited English proficiency, she wasn’t sure how good she was.
“But because I was so conscious of it, I can get a laugh out of a line that is not funny. I’m just a laugh [prostitute]. I look for laughs that don’t exist, or I create them. A lot of people don’t like that and say, ‘Don’t do that.’ They want the laugh where they want the laugh, and they don’t want anything taken away from the star,” Torres explained.
“If the star is not up to par with the part…I have worked with some very serious actors who have no sense of comedy and comedic timing. If you do something out of whack it throws them off – like getting a laugh. So, it’s a gift and a curse at the same time.”
Everyone soon realized that Liz was incredibly skilled and had impeccable comedic timing. She was performing one night when the Tonight Show producer for Johnny Carson saw her and urged her to try out in front of the talent coordinator.
“[It was one of the most important moments in my career], absolutely. I was doing standup with improvisation, and they came in and said, ‘we want to audition some of the comics for the show,” Liz Torres recalled on the Carson podcast.
“At Rockefeller Center, they had his tiny, charming little theatre. There were five of us, and we all auditioned. The only one that made it was me.
“[The other comedians] were pissed,” she added. “You could tell the improv was a boys club.”
Liz made a successful appearance on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. She performed comedy as well as some singing and dancing. She stood out from many other guest stars in one respect. It was always simple for the production to call her at the last minute if another guest had to cancel because she was a New York native who still lived in the city.
“They called me in if someone didn’t show up. Everyone wanted a secure date,” Torres explained.
“I was never like that, I kept my music at the door if I’d had to run out. I would replace people all the time. If an author got stuck in a snowstorm in Idaho, they’d call me, and I was there in five minutes.”
Additionally, Torres’ appearances on The Tonight Show attracted attention. Her debut performance was as a prostitute in the low-budget 1969 movie Utterly Without Redeeming Social Value. Liz was able to transition seamlessly into an acting profession after that.
Besides doing regular roles on television variety shows in the 1970s, she replaced Barbara Colby on the Mary Tyler Moore spinoff series Phyllis in 1975.
Liz later performed as a comedian in addition to making appearances in a number of short-lived programs. After that, in 1989, things began to calm down. For her work as Angie in The Famous Teddy Z, she received a Primetime Emmy nomination for Outstanding Guest Actress in a Comedy Series.
“I’ve kept myself busy by doing standup comedy, nightclubs, and guest television appearances while I’ve been waiting for one or the other to take off for 28 years now – which I consider quite a miracle!” Liz Torres told The Herald News in 1990.
“I mean, I’ve actually kept myself working….Sure there have been lean times. This business is either feast or famine, so the you are working, you have to learn to save your money to balance out the bad times.”
Of course, everyone can experience poor luck. Everything would eventually pay off for Liz since Mahalia on The John Larroquette Show gave her her major television break in 1993.
Torres received praise from critics for her performance on the program, where she spent three years and 84 episodes. Two Primetime Emmy nominations for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series went to Liz as well.
Liz continued to work in the entertainment industry in the 1990s, both as a voice actor and as a regular on-screen actor. Then, in 2000, she was introduced to a new generation of television viewers when she was cast as Miss Patty in the popular series Gilmore Girls.
She received plaudits for her performance as Miss Patty, which she shared the screen with Lauren Graham, Alexis Bledel, and Torres’ old friend Sally Anne Struthers. She appeared in 79 episodes during the course of her seven-year tenure on the program.
Torres developed a strong bond with her character and lamented the end of the program. She went on to land further parts in popular television programs like Scandal, Desperate Housewives, and Ugly Betty.
However, the comedian and actress would return to her favorite role when Gilmore Girls returned as a mini-series in 2016, Gilmore Girls: A Year in The Life.
“I couldn’t believe it! I had mourned Ms. Patty and I had mourned The Gilmore Girls for these eight years,” she explained.
“When I’m finally accepting that I’m not going to be Ms. Patty anymore (because I loved the character and it was so much fun) all of a sudden [like Al Pacino] ‘they bring me back in…’ They brought me back for two episodes and I was so happy to be on that set.”
She added that she would be open to doing more than two episodes.
“Oh my God! I would sign up in a second! I love it! It’s one of my most favorite projects that I’ve ever done,” Torres said. “I’m sixty-nine years old and I have been doing this since I was fourteen years old. It’s one of my favorite, favorite projects.”
The past few years have been pretty unique for Liz personally, aside from the opportunity to work on one of her all-time favorite projects once more. The Emmy-winning actress has shed a lot of weight since 1975, when she wed producer and director Peter Locke. The difference is startling today.
We want to make it crystal clear right now that everyone is lovely in their own unique manner. No matter what, we should always treat one another with respect and understanding since what matters most is inner beauty rather than how anyone of us seems on the outside.
Liz responded to the question “I wish I could stop” in a 1996 Q&A with the Chicago Tribune by saying “gaining weight.” Liz disliked her weight gain, which had been apparent for a while.
“I’m heavy. This is the reality. I don’t kick myself about it, but I don’t think I look fabulous in my clothes. I know that in my suits I look like a box walking down the street,” Torres the Los Angeles Times in 1997.
“That’s the thing that hurts me most. Thank God, there’s a product out there that you can wear that’s passable. It’s corrective dressing, but it’s not who I am and ultimately that’s very hard.”
Liz discussed the impact her weight had on her career in the same interview, particularly since she is of Latino origin from Puerto Rico, which made working in Hollywood even more difficult.
“When you gain weight, nobody looks at you. When I got heavier–and being Hispanic on television is limiting–I played a lot of maids,” she said.
“I would go on the set and people would not look at me. They also tend not to hear you. You have to make them focus on you. If I really want to be heard, I have that command but a lot of heavy women don’t. When I see someone heavy working on television I say, “Oh, God, go, girl. You do it.” You know, it shouldn’t stop your life.”
In 2010, Torres was hardly recognisable as she flaunted her significant weight loss on the opening night of the Broadway production of It Must Be Him. She has also maintained her weight loss. We love the way she looks!
Liz Torres’ career is outstanding. The fact that she succeeded in decreasing weight is highly motivating.
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