Maya Rudolph has entered the chat, so to speak, when it comes to the ongoing ‘nepo baby’ conversation in Hollywood.
The 51-year-old comedian is the daughter of singer Minnie Ripperton – who died at just 31 in 1979 from cancer – and songwriter Richard Rudolph, who co-wrote many of her hit songs like 1974 classic Lovin’ You.
Despite growing up in a showbiz household, Rudolph opened up on Dax Shepard’s Armchair Expert podcast that her upbringing provided little help to her comedy career, though she said recently her high school classmate Jack Black helped her.
‘They were musicians. They weren’t actors. My trajectory was, I wanted to go to New York, and I wanted to be on Saturday Night Live,’ Rudolph said, a goal she achieved in 2000.
‘I understand that drive to be somewhere else — forage in a new city and create my own path. But that’s a huge undertaking,’ she admitted.
Maya Rudolph has entered the chat, so to speak, when it comes to the ongoing ‘ nepo baby ‘ conversation in Hollywood
The 51-year-old comedian is the daughter of singer Minnie Ripperton – who died at just 31 in 1979 from cancer – and songwriter Richard Rudolph, who co-wrote many of her hit songs like 1974 classic Lovin’ You
Despite growing up in a showbiz household, Rudolph opened up on Dax Shepard’s Armchair Expert podcast that her upbringing provided little help to her comedy career, though she said recently her high school classmate Jack Black helped her
‘I wasn’t like, “Oh my dad writes songs, that’s gonna make me a comedian.” There was no direct line. I knew I had to get there myself,’ Rudolph said.
Maya’s mother Minnie Ripperton was diagnosed with breast cancer in August 1976 and quickly spread to her lymphatic system where she was given just six months to live.
Nearly three years later, in July 1979, she passed away at just 31 years of age, just two weeks shy of Maya’s 7th birthday.
‘It’s interesting because my mom was a singer that not all my friends were that aware of at the time,” she said.
‘Everybody that knows who I am now knows that’s my mom. But growing up, I didn’t feel like she was a household name. I felt like she was special, yeah,’ Rudolph said.
When she did break into comedy at SNL, many of her cast mates didn’t know she had a famous mother, since she shares her father’s name, not her mother’s.
‘So when I started doing SNL, people didn’t really know she was my mom, and they figured it out later,’ she admitted.
Rudolph admitted, ‘So, look, when you’re a kid and your mom dies, you don’t want people to know that.’
‘I wasn’t like, “Oh my dad writes songs, that’s gonna make me a comedian.” There was no direct line. I knew I had to get there myself,’ Rudolph said
Maya’s mother Minnie Ripperton was diagnosed with breast cancer in August 1976 and quickly spread to her lymphatic system where she was given just six months to live
Nearly three years later, in July 1979, she passed away at just 31 years of age, just two weeks shy of Maya’s 7th birthday
While her parents didn’t provide much assistance, she revealed earlier this month that one of her high school classmates helped her get into acting: Jack Black.
‘My drama teacher put us together, and he was my improv coach for an improv competition we did,’ she recalled on The Drew Barrymore Show.
‘And he got me into the improv class, and he took me to my first Groundlings show, which is where I ended up,’ added Rudolph.
She raved that Black, 54, ‘was the most inspiring,’ noting that he transferred to her school when he was a sophomore and she was in eighth grade.
‘First of all, you have to understand something about Jack: Jack has been the same person since the day I met him. The exact same person. He’s just that guy. He’s just special,’ she said.
