AN APPRECIATION : Gilda: She Was Always Something . . .

In perhaps her last TV interview, which several networks picked up in parting tribute, Gilda Radner spoke of how she loved comedy for its own sake. She was characteristically dressed in coveralls, and her hair tufted up on the sides of its own accord, which gave her the look of someone who’d been painting scenery backstage and had been called out by a cinema verite camera crew looking for a new angle with which to shoot a show.

That unpretentiousness, that happy-to-be-here glow, and her delight at the form, were some of the things we realized we’d be missing when we heard of her death at age 42 on Saturday.

Most people knew that she’d been fighting ovarian cancer for nearly three years. But it wasn’t just the respect for a heroic battle that her death evoked, it was a real affection as well.

Of the initial ensemble that made TV’s “Saturday Night Live,” for better or for worse, a benchmark in the history of American comedy, she came off as one of the least cynical and self-impressed of the bunch. There was a naturalness about her pesky eccentrics--particularly the cautionary Emily Litella and militantly misinformed Roseanne Roseannadanna--that resisted the underlying but palpable conceit that show biz is where it’s at and that celebrity is modern civilization’s highest cultural achievement. It’s noteworthy to mention that, when the gang broke up, her colleagues went to TV and movies and she went to Broadway. It kept her closer to people.

Every generation of performers has its own obstacles. If once it was poverty, in the case of Radner it was a matter of being brought along too quickly. It would be a disservice to say that she did consistently brilliant work, but she had the misfortune to arrive when nobody seriously objected to bad comedy writing, and tastelessness was (and still is) confused with courage and iconoclasm.

But it’s highly possible that hers was the kind of sensibility that needed time to develop, and her illness cut short her comedic growth. There’s no doubt, though, that she had a keen eye for the eccentricities of ordinary people and a memory for all the stages of her life that Stanislavsky would have admired. She was an astute mimic (her impression of the crushingly dull rock promoter Don Kirshner is dead-on), and her Lisa Loopner is a masterpiece of dreary sincerity.

Unlike many of her contemporaries, she was never contemptuous of the well-meaning people she portrayed, whose misfortune was to be comically unhip. Perhaps that’s one of the things we’ve discovered in retrospect and know now we’ll miss: She was an observer, not a scavenger.

We know too that she waged her fight with total dignity. She didn’t exploit herself on talk shows. She didn’t make capital on her illness. She offered no lurid public confessionals. If she didn’t feel well, she stayed out of sight. She was a sweet-tempered woman and a pro. Her single connection with Hollywood myth was real: With her husband Gene Wilder, she lived out a great love story.

That was Gilda.