Still breaking Hollywood taboos at 76, the actor plays an abortion-funding grandmother in her new film. Here she talks freely about babies, being gay – and her famous temper

Lily Tomlin is wearing black to match her mood. She’s depressed about the state of the world. The Paris terror attacks erupted a few days before we meet, and she’s been listening to a rightwing radio talkshow in the car on the way here.

“These are killers!” she says of Isis.

She sits across the table from me, in a black Adidas sweatsuit with white stripes down each sleeve, and black Converse trainers. She speaks at such speed the words career into each other like dodgem cars. “And we went over and destabilised them! And killed so many people! So it’s like mumbo jumbo, like putting nuts under a cup.”

I’m not sure what she means, or that “nuts under a cup” is a recognisable phrase, but Tomlin utters it with such defiance it probably should be.

On she goes, speaking in the Detroit twang of her youth, where consonants are dropped and vowels flattened and sentiments expressed as convincing fact. Then she breaks off, looking around her, as if remembering where she is.

“I’m not sure I want to talk about it in the press,” she says. “I’m very protective… people will shoot you on the spot. But what are you going to do about Isis?” She looks at me, as if I have the answer. I do not. Silence.

We are in her office in Studio City, Los Angeles, a room stuffed with twinkling gold trophies and statuettes, and framed magazine covers. Some miniature fibreglass palm trees are stacked inexplicably on the green carpet. We are seated on either side of a table, sandwiched between two enormous filing cabinets: the one behind Tomlin bears several yellow Post-It notes with “ALL JANE” written across them in capital letters. She tells me this is to mark the documents belonging to her wife and producing partner, Jane Wagner.

It seems chaotic but organised, in much the same way as Tomlin’s wayward black-grey hair frizzes out in every direction. There is a silver hairpin stuck halfway down her head, as if she has forgotten about it. Her ears are shrouded by two enormous floating foam circles – they look like headphones, but without anything connecting them. What are those?

“Oh, I’m sorry,” Tomlin says, with a sudden gale of laughter. She takes them off one by one. “I can hear you. They keep your ears warm because the wind is so cold.”

In an industry where most actresses struggle for work, and gay stars are rarer than they should be, she is on a roll

Her assistant has furnished us with a paper plate crammed full of biscuits from Starbucks. Tomlin crumbles a piece of ginger cake with fingers knotted by arthritis and eats it rapidly. The sugar seems to give her a direct hit of positivity and she is suddenly giggly and girlish, her lively eyes darting this way and that; her long, mobile face breaking easily into smiles.

Her mood has shifted so quickly it is almost as if she has slipped into a different character, and I can see with startling clarity the mercurial quality that has made her one of America’s foremost comic actresses.

She made her name on US primetime sketch comedy in the 1960s, developing a host of characters that became part of the national culture – from Ernestine, the uptight Bronx phone operator, to the precocious five-year-old Edith Ann, who sat in an oversized rocking chair with her ragdoll, Doris, and offered philosophical pronouncements on everyday life.

From there, Tomlin went on to become the first woman to appear solo in a Broadway show, in Appearing Nitely in 1977, and to star in a wide range of films (Robert Altman’s Nashville; 9 to 5 with Dolly Parton; Big Business with Bette Midler) and hit television programmes (Desperate Housewives, The West Wing and Will & Grace). Along the way, she has scooped a clutch of awards: five Emmys, one Golden Globe, and a Grammy in 1973 for best comedy recording. If America had a lesbian, 76-year-old national treasure, Tomlin would be it.

And she is at the peak of her career. At an age when most actresses struggle to get work, and in an industry where openly gay stars are rarer than they should be, she is on a roll. In Grandma, released in the UK next month, Tomlin takes the lead as an impecunious gay poet who tries to raise $600 in a day, to pay for her granddaughter’s abortion. It is a film which director Paul Weitz wrote specifically for her, and which has already garnered rave reviews in the US, and talk of an Oscar nomination.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest In her latest film, Grandma, Tomlin plays an ageing gay poet trying to raise $600 for her granddaughter’s abortion.

“I know, I know,” she says, flapping her hands. “But I think it will blow over… because it’s a long way to the Oscars. And there’s a lot of good performances this year.”

Would she like to win an Oscar?

“Yes, I would, just because I’d like to make something out of it.”

In what way? By using the acceptance speech for a purpose?

“Yeah. I don’t want to tell you what I’d like to do, because then I won’t be able to do it.”

The character of Elle Reid in Grandma is, like Tomlin herself, deliciously mischievous: a foul-mouthed grandmother struggling to cope with the death of her long-term partner, who acts in ways that are both wildly unpredictable and strangely lovable. In one scene, Tomlin beats up her granddaughter’s no-hoper teenage boyfriend with an ice hockey stick and calls him a “sorry-ass loser”, before telling him he shouldn’t have a beard because “your face looks like an armpit”.

Weitz has said he based Elle on Tomlin. How did that feel?

“Kind of strange.”

She says Elle is similar to her “in many ways” and that she even drove her own car in the film. But is Tomlin actually that cantankerous?

“I can be – much to the dismay of the people around me. I’m not cantankerous so much as volatile… I just get overwhelmed with all the work and expectation. And I might get really irascible. Then I’m laughing and I’m over it.”

There is a YouTube clip of Lily Tomlin famously losing her shit on the set of David O Russell’s I Heart Huckabees. The grainy footage shows her sitting in the front of a car, squeezed next to Dustin Hoffman, and objecting forcefully to some direction she has been given.

“Fuck you motherfucker,” she screeches, flicking the finger at the cameraman. “Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you!”

She gives a raucous laugh when I mention this, and says that what you can’t see from that clip is Russell running around outside the car, saying rude things to her to elicit a reaction. She loves the film and she loves Russell, but “he’s such a crazy, wild man”. Plus, it had been a long day and “I just hit the ceiling”. Her favourite thing about the episode is the bit where Hoffman says to her, like the true actor he is: “Use it, use it.”

Perhaps it is Tomlin’s volatility which makes her so compelling on screen. She has an extraordinary emotional range and can shift from comedic to tragic in the space of a sentence. She has a penchant for lengthy, humorous anecdotes, often about her childhood in Detroit, growing up in an apartment building filled with fascinating inhabitants whom she can recall with a precise turn of phrase (“Mrs Clancy, who lived over us on the second floor, taught in a girls’ school and she was just totally pretentious. She had dyed hair, black hair, reddish under root, you know?”).

And then in the midst of these entertaining monologues, she will switch without warning to talking about global warming deniers (“ignorant”) or Donald Trump (“primitive bully”). At one point, she makes herself cry by talking about injured soldiers and then grabs a dishcloth from the table to blot her face. Pat pat pat with the dishcloth. “I can laugh in the next breath,” she says through her tears. Pat pat pat.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest With Martin Sheen in The West Wing. Photograph: E4

It could be that she’s exhausted. Tomlin has just finished filming the second season of the hit Netflix series Grace and Frankie, in which she co-stars with her friend Jane Fonda as two long-married women whose husbands have left them for each other. It’s interesting that both Grandma and Grace and Frankie are mainstream projects with gay characters at the centre of the plot. Recently, there have been notable strides made in showing gay or transgender characters on-screen – from Orange Is the New Black to Todd Haynes’s new film, Carol, starring Cate Blanchett as a married woman who embarks on a same-sex love affair, or Freeheld, with Julianne Moore and Ellen Page, which recounted the true story of a gay police officer’s attempts to have her pension benefits transferred to her partner.

Page publicly came out as gay this year and was subjected to online abuse.

“It did make it hard on her, it’s true,” says Tomlin. “I mean, the best thing you can do for yourself is just go on as if it doesn’t exist and be bold.”

Perhaps it's her volatility that makes her so compelling on screen. She can shift from comedic to tragic in a sentence

Tomlin was never tempted to announce her own sexuality, even though it was known in industry circles for years and Time magazine offered to put her on the cover in 1975 if she came out. “Well, it would have been suicidal career wise at that point,” she admits. “Also, it’s sort of like they didn’t want any specific gay person for the cover, they just wanted a gay person.”

Is it still more difficult for openly gay actors to get work?

“Probably for a leading role, yeah. A romantic role. I mean, I never was considered for those roles anyway.”

Do gay actors have a responsibility to be open about their sexuality, to make it easier for others to come out?

“I don’t hold anybody to some strict expectation because I don’t know what that person’s circumstance is. The one reason I didn’t come out more fully, really, is because I knew it would hurt my mother. She was so southern [Tomlin’s parents came from Kentucky], so Methodist, she believed so much in Jesus.”

Tomlin tells me her younger brother, Richard, is also gay – “I’m telling you so much stuff it’s amazing” – and that he and his partner, Michael, lived in the same town as their mother until she died 10 years ago, at 91. Their sexuality was never discussed.

“My mother was pretty traditional,” says Tomlin. “Most of my relatives? Same thing. That generation would be horrified, 20, 30 years ago, if I’d announced it to them. So I never did.”

Mary Jean Tomlin was born on 1 September 1939. She describes herself as a “precocious” child: she remembers being six or seven and trying to get her friend Tommy to lie on top of her and “do movie star kisses”. And she always broke her curfew.

Her parents had moved to Detroit from Kentucky, looking for work in the wake of the Great Depression. Her father, Guy, was a factory worker and an alcoholic (“He wasn’t a bad drunk,” says Tomlin, who speaks of him with great affection). He died at the age of 56, when Tomlin was 30. Her mother, Lillie Mae, from whom Tomlin took her stage name, was a housewife and a nurse’s aide. Tomlin loved them both dearly, but was irrepressible. She learned to read early and would fight her father for the newspaper.

“One time, he reached to take it away from me and he tore the paper, so he took off his belt and he spanked my leg. He left a big welt on my leg. I ran out on to the street… and I sobbed, I screamed, ‘My father’s beating me!”’ Tomlin says, clutching her hands to her breast and adopting a wailing, theatrical pose. “I just carried on terribly. So they stopped trying to discipline me.”

She went to the local high school and studied biology at Wayne State University in Detroit. A friend suggested she audition for a play and her interest was sparked; she found she could make people laugh. Soon, she was doing standup comedy gigs in Detroit clubs and then moved to New York, making ends meet as a waitress in between jobs.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest With Dustin Hoffman in I Heart Huckabees. Photograph: imagenet

By 1969, she had landed a regular slot on NBC’s comedy sketch show Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In. She was an instant hit; when Tomlin went to visit her parents a few months after starting on the show she was already being recognised in public.

“My dad took us out to dinner. I’d never gone to a restaurant with my dad in my life… And he said to the waitress, ‘You know who that is?’ And the woman looked at me and said, ‘Yes, that’s your daughter.’ He said, ‘You’re damn right.’ And then to me, he said, ‘Babe, get up and sing a song for the people.’ I said, ‘Daddy, don’t ask me to sing; I can’t do that.’ He said, ‘Babe, get up and sing a song for the people.’ And I said, ‘Poppa please don’t ask me’ and he said, ‘Babe, you’ve gotta learn how to be popular.’”

She smiles broadly at the memory. Tomlin loves that story, the way it shows that fatherly mix of unspoken pride and paternal concern; the way her father remained so honest and true in the face of her burgeoning celebrity. She used the anecdote in her first television show, but the audience didn’t get it.

“That kind of story for me is glorious and I expect the audience as one to just kind of gasp with wonderment, but they don’t for the most part,” she says, a touch sadly. “Now, you had a lovely reaction. I was very pleased with that.”

I get the sense that Tomlin, perpetually curious about other human beings, is continually assessing me. I can imagine her internal cogs whirring and clicking into place with key details about my appearance and mannerisms to regurgitate at some later point, either as an anecdote or inspiration for a new character. She has a fizzing, electric brain, but her intelligence is directed towards understanding people – there’s a warmth to it.

Her mother, too, was “totally sweet, totally intelligent, soft spoken, very witty… And never sarcastic, never ridiculing, always such a loving, sweet way of being hilariously funny.”

Tomlin recalls a party some years ago where her mother effortlessly charmed all the guests. Later that evening, Tomlin said: “‘Mama, everybody just loves you. And you always have some sweet, witty thing to say.’ And she said, ‘You know, sometimes I think it up ahead of time.’” She whoops with laughter. “I just die for those stories. So great.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest With her wife, Jane Wagner, in 1986. The couple got together in the early 70s, but Tomlin resisted coming out fully, for fear of upsetting her Methodist mother. Photograph: Oliver Morris/Getty Images

Tomlin met her future wife – the writer Jane Wagner – in 1971, after inviting her to collaborate on a comedy album. It was, according to Tomlin, “love at first sight”. Wagner wrote Tomlin’s hit Broadway show, The Search For Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe. Tomlin won a Tony and it was later turned into a film. The couple married in 2013 but have never had children.

“I mean, sometimes I think it would be nice to have somebody who looks like a replica of you in some fashion, but I don’t think it ever was an aspiration of mine.”

Did Wagner feel the same?

“I don’t think so. She would…” Tomlin trails off. “She has a very handsome nephew and we thought, ‘Well, we could get his sperm and I could bear his child.’ I wouldn’t want to, but I could.”

But in reality, Tomlin says, she would be the one who would “have to get up and fix breakfast for the kids and all that… So in retrospect, we say every day, ‘I’m so glad we didn’t have any children.’ When I think of the world now, I don’t want to even deal with having to raise a child.”

She talks matter of factly, but it’s evident that Tomlin has always been something of a trailblazer, without ever acknowledging that’s what she’s doing. She just gets on with it. In the early years of her career, she experienced sexism: she recounts several occasions when she and Jane would pitch a project to a studio boss “and it was like they didn’t hear it. And then later, the guy would come back to it and propose it and they would be all alert. It was just the way it was. It was unfortunate.” So Tomlin wrote her own material, “because I had to”.

She’s excited about the new wave of feminism and that it no longer seems like a taboo thing to admit to. Yet she works in a sexist industry, where women are routinely discriminated against on the grounds of age or looks and where equal pay has to be fought for. The age barrier hasn’t particularly affected Tomlin, because she’s always been a character actress, but the tendency to cast much younger females as the girlfriends or wives of older men annoys her. I tell her I recently interviewed a male movie star in his 70s who dismissed the idea that it was harder for older women to get roles by saying Helen Mirren was still in work.

“Yeah, but Helen Mirren’s playing the Queen all the time,” guffaws Tomlin. “I just saw Helen Mirren the other day; she’s lovely, but, you know, she doesn’t play a wife or a girlfriend of somebody of equal age.”

In May, Tomlin and Jane Fonda discovered they were being paid the same amount as the male leads in Grace and Frankie, despite the actors, Martin Sheen and Sam Waterston, having supporting roles. “I’m going to try and get us paid more this year,” she says.

You should, I reply.

“Yeah, a lot of women – great movie stars – don’t get paid what men do. I don’t know what the disparity is, but it’s probably as much as they can get away with. I’ve never been in that rarefied air of $20m a picture or whatever they get, but…”

But in society at large, there is a pay disparity between men and women.

'I think people in the industry have to die off. I really do.' Who? The old, white men who are in charge? 'Yes, mostly'

Tomlin nods. “When I started in the movement, women were making 59 cents to the [male] dollar. Now they’re making, like, 74 cents or something to the dollar. So that’s not a lot of progress. But it’s some progress. And we’re supposed to be grateful for those crumbs. So I think those things will eventually… I don’t know, I think people have to die off. I really do.”

Which people? The old, white men who are in charge?

Tomlin grins: “Yes, mostly.”

She’s aware she might go first. Her good friend Joan Rivers died last year, and the realisation came to her that “you’ve lived more than you’re going to live”. If she looks back, does she feel it has been a life well lived?

“No,” she says baldly. “I just feel like I’ve maybe done a little better than some other people. But no, I don’t look back and think, ‘Ah, this is perfect.’ I don’t even relate to any of it, except the stories I’m telling you.”

Ah, yes: the stories. Lily Tomlin has lots of them. They are wonderful – but only because of the way she tells them.

• Grandma is on general release from 11 December