Kelly Bishop Opens Up About 'Very Private' Abortion, Says She Always Knew She Didn't Want Kids (Exclusive)
The ‘Gilmore Girls’ actress writes about the experience in her upcoming memoir, ‘The Third Gilmore Girl’
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Kelly Bishop in 2012Kelly Bishop was just a child when she proclaimed to her mother, Jane, that she didn't want to have children of her own.
“I was quite young,” Bishop, 80, tells PEOPLE for this week’s print issue. “I remember my mother even reminded me [when I was an adult], ‘You were a little girl when you said ... I'm not going to have children.'”
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“I meant it,” Bishop says. “And that was fine. I mean, that’s a choice.”
The Tony-winning actress is looking back on her stage and screen career in her new memoir The Third Gilmore Girl, out Sept. 17 from Gallery Books — from her groundbreaking role in the 1975 Broadway musical A Chorus Line, which was based upon tapes that Bishop recorded about her life as a chorus dancer, to her part as Jennifer Grey’s mother in the ‘80s classic Dirty Dancing, to her beloved role as the stern Gilmore matriarch Emily on the 2000-2007 family drama Gilmore Girls.
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Kelly Bishop in 2020But Bishop, who writes that she’s generally a private person, also opens up about her personal life — including a failed first marriage to a compulsive gambler and the abortion she had when she was in her thirties.
“It was such a relief just knowing that that option was there,” Bishop says. “Of course, it never had occurred to me that I would accidentally get pregnant. That never even crossed my mind. But the fact that that was available and legal, it was just a relief.”
Bishop says that she wasn’t originally planning on including her abortion story in the memoir, though not for “any feeling of shame and wrongdoing.”
“That's something private that I just was not going to put in until the Supreme Court got rid of Roe v. Wade,” Bishop says. “And more and more women — actresses, but other celebrity-type women — were coming out of my generation, saying, ‘I had an abortion. I had an abortion.’”
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This issue became an important one for Bishop, despite describing herself as “not really political.” She recalls attending a 2004 pro-choice rally in Washington, DC with Gilmore Girls creator Amy Sherman-Palladino and producer Helen Pai, and says that sharing her own abortion experience was a way to reach out to younger readers.
“I just wanted to include it so that young women of today get a sense of where we were then,” Bishop says.
Though she doesn’t have any biological children of her own, Bishop is the stepmother to Norma Sheryl Leonard, the daughter of Bishop’s late husband, former ESPN and CNN host Lee Leonard, who Bishop was married to from 1981 until Leonard’s death in 2018.
“There was just so much love and respect between the two of us,” Bishop says, of their marriage. “He didn't try to lord it over me. Which is tricky because he was 15 years my senior, from a completely different generation, really.”
Today, Bishop, who resides in New Jersey with her hound dog Dolly, is keeping another idea from childhood close: the drive to keep learning.
“You can learn things every single day. Even little tiny things,” Bishop says. "Because when you're learning, you're growing. You continue to grow, and that's what I want.”
The Third GilmoreGirl will arrived on shelves on Sept. 17 and is now available for preorder, wherever books are sold.
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