From October 17 to 19, “Gilmore Girls” fans flocked to the small town of Guilford to attend the Firelight Festival. A celebration of all things Gilmore, attendees get to mingle with actors from the beloved series, and 2025 marked the attendance of a special guest: Kelly Bishop aka Emily Gilmore.
Kevin Winter/Getty ImagesBishop answered questions about her character and the series, which is now on the Hallmark Channel. She discussed everything from her dyslexia to her role in “Dirty Dancing,” and no topic seemed to be off-limits. She also shared more details with the audience about her first marriage, which she called “disastrous.”
Kelly Bishop Shares Candid Details About Financial Ruin After Her First Marriage
Bishop’s first marriage was to Broadway stagehand and electrician Peter Miller when she was 26. A compulsive gambler, he ended up taking all of her money to pay off gambling debts, she told the crowd at the Firelight Festival. In her 2024 memoirs, “The Third Gilmore,” she had gone into detail about the difficult marriage. At the time, gambling wasn’t widely considered an addiction.
“I did not understand that as an addiction,” she told Fox News Digital in 2024. “I had made all sorts of deals with him. I even made him go to a therapist for a while. I later learned through my own psychotherapy that you can’t cure an addiction through therapy.”
Bishop didn’t know how to help her husband. “I thought if I could just give him the confidence to know how much he’s loved, he would be able to get over this,” she admitted.
“The only thing that happened was I was dead broke when I left that marriage,” Bishop added. “That’s what happened. It was difficult. It just didn’t work.”
From Roach-Infested Apartment to Broadway Star: Kelly Bishop’s Big Break
Many people know Bishop as Marjorie Houseman from “Dirty Dancing” or Emily Gilmore from “Gilmore Girls,” but her career began long before. In fact, Bishop’s acting career began with the theater.
In 1975, Bishop originated the role of Sheila in the Broadway production “A Chorus Line.” The role came just in time, as she was about the lose her unemployment benefits. “After those three weeks of unemployment were over, I was living on $100 a week,” Bishop told the Wall Street Journal. She was living in “a terrible one-room, roach-infested apartment.”
But after “A Chorus Line” opened, everything changed. Not only was the show a success, but she won a Tony Award for Best Featured Actress in a Musical. And Edward Herrmann — her future husband on “Gilmore Girls” — won for Best Featured Actor in a Play.
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