Carol Burnett did not need time to think when asked about her most embarrassing Hollywood moment. Her answer was Billy Wilder’s The Front Page.
“When I did that, I was terrible,” the 93-year-old comedian said in an interview resurfaced by PEOPLE on Aug. 21. Burnett remembered going into the 1974 movie believing the role of Mollie Malloy was right for her, only to become increasingly nervous during production and deeply unhappy with her performance.
She avoided watching the finished movie after its release, convinced that her work was as bad as she feared and painfully aware that some critics agreed with her assessment.
Then Burnett boarded a flight to New York and learned that the in-flight entertainment would be the one movie she desperately did not want to see. The situation became worse when a flight attendant announced to the cabin that one of The Front Page‘s stars was sitting among them.
The Plane Ride Turned Her Movie Regret Into a Punchline
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Burnett recalled that the passengers initially reacted enthusiastically when the flight attendant identified her. “Everybody turned around and smiled and waved,” she said. Burnett’s own response was considerably less excited: “Oh no. Oh my god.”
Once the movie started, passengers pulled down their window shades so they could see the in-flight screen more clearly. Burnett could not resist taking at least a partial look herself. “I just couldn’t watch,” she recalled. “It was terrible.”
What happened when the movie ended gave the story its perfect Burnett-style ending. “The movie ends, everybody puts the shades up and nobody turns around to smile,” she said. The anecdote was also carried by AOL through PEOPLE’s syndicated coverage.
Burnett Said She Knew During Filming That Something Was Wrong
Burnett’s dissatisfaction was not something that developed only after she read the reviews. She told Patrick Labyorteaux that she originally thought Mollie was the right role for her but became nervous while making the movie.
“I thought it was the right part,” Burnett said. “But I was nervous.” By the time The Front Page reached theaters, she wanted little to do with watching herself in it. “After it was released, I never wanted to see it because I knew how awful I was and I certainly did not get good reviews and so forth,” she said.
‘The Front Page’ Put Her Between Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau
Directed by Billy Wilder and written by Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond, the movie adapted Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur’s famous 1928 play about Chicago newspaper reporter Hildy Johnson and his relentless editor, Walter Burns.
Jack Lemmon played Hildy, a reporter preparing to leave journalism and marry Peggy Grant, played by Susan Sarandon. Walter Matthau played Burns, who tries to keep his star reporter at the newspaper just as condemned prisoner Earl Williams escapes and creates an irresistible final scoop.
The official Universal listing identifies the movie as a 1974 comedy-drama with a 105-minute runtime. Its cast also included Vincent Gardenia, David Wayne, Allen Garfield, Austin Pendleton and Charles Durning. The American Film Institute records the film’s New York opening as Dec. 18, 1974.
She Has Actually Been Telling This Story for Decades
Even the January 2025 interview was not the first time Burnett publicly admitted how much she disliked her work in The Front Page. In a 2003 profile, The Washington Post recorded Burnett telling essentially the same airplane story.
“I hated me in The Front Page,” she said at the time, calling her work in the movie “really bad.” Burnett said she already knew while making it that she was unhappy with the performance and later felt the negative reviews confirmed her fears.
She then described boarding a flight with her then-husband, producer Joe Hamilton, only to hear the flight attendant announce that The Front Page would be shown and that Burnett herself was aboard.