She was Roseanne Roseannadanna and Baba Wawa. She was also the wife of “Young Frankenstein” star Gene Wilder and a pioneer for women in comedy.

That’s how most of us remember Gilda Radner, the beloved “Saturday Night Live” star who died of ovarian cancer in 1989, at 42. The organization she inspired, Gilda’s Club, continues to help cancer patients and their families.

Now, the documentary “Love, Gilda,” out Friday, reveals that beneath her boundless bubbly vitality, the famous comic struggled with personal demons dating back to childhood — especially with the way she viewed her body.

“What really came up is [how] this beautiful woman who’s on television with a big smile felt so bad about herself,” the film’s director, Lisa D’Apolito, tells The Post. “If you look at her five years at ‘Saturday Night Live,’ and you look at Season 4, she is so skinny.”

D’Apolito began working on “Love, Gilda” four years ago as a passion project, meant to be mostly about Gilda’s Club. There was middling interest in her movie from producers and distributors, who pointed out that other documentaries about Radner had been filmed for TV before, such as a 1997 episode of “E! True Hollywood Story.” So, she kept “Love, Gilda” on the back burner.

D’Apolito had nearly finished a shorter, first draft, largely made up of interviews with Radner’s friends and family, when Gilda’s brother, Michael, gave her access to the family’s storage unit in Detroit, where Gilda grew up. There, D’Apolito and Gilda’s best friend, Judy Levy, discovered a treasure trove of the “SNL” star’s belongings, including journals, audio recordings and videos.

“That changed everything — going through the boxes, finding audio tapes and listening to Gilda,” D’Apolito says. “Oh, my God, we can make a film that’s different.”

The first item they found was a jaw-dropping video. In Radner’s 1989 memoir, “It’s Always Something,” she describes filming one of her chemotherapy treatments. The footage, friends assumed, was lost.

“And then Judy found it, in Gilda’s writing: ‘Gilda’s Ninth Chemotherapy Video,’ ” says D’Apolito. “It’s Gilda in her hospital gown … a 20-minute film of Gilda talking about her cancer.”

A few minutes of that rare footage is shown in the movie. Radner, attached to an IV, her hair thinning, speaks candidly about her nervousness as her loving husband Wilder holds the camera.

“I was panicked this time,” Radner says. “I didn’t want to come for this treatment. I thought if I filmed it, it would add a dimension to take my mind off it.”

Indeed, Radner often turned to her personal demons to fuel her art — struggles her audience knew nothing about.

As a child, Radner’s weight was a constant issue. Her mother, Henrietta, a svelte, attractive and traditional 1940s housewife, expected her daughter to be the same, and one day marry a doctor or lawyer. But Gilda had an appetite for bold experiences — and food.

“I overate constantly,” Radner says on one of the tapes. “My weight distressed my mother, so she took me to a doctor who put me on Dexatrim diet pills when I was 10 years old.”

It was her devoted grandmother, whom she called “Dibby,” who told Gilda how to deflect her pain with comedy.

“When I would come home crying because somebody called me fat at school, she would tell me, ‘If they call you fat, just make a joke about it and laugh,’” Radner says on a tape. “I made them laugh before they hurt me. Before any kid could go, ‘Hey, you fat thing,’ I would say, ‘Hey, I’m fat! I can’t see my toes!’

“And then I realized what comedy is: It’s hitting on the truth before the other guy thinks of it.”

That light bulb moment helped her with bullies, but her battle with low self-esteem wasn’t over.

In 1978, at the height of her “SNL” fame, the pressure of looking thin on TV and partying with models and rock stars collided with her love of food. To cope, Radner developed eating disorders. She devoted a few sentences to the problem in her memoir, and subsequent biographies have touched on the issue. But the diaries D’Apolito found revealed a deeper, bigger pain than anybody knew.

“My picture’s in the newspaper, but my body’s in the garbage,” Radner wrote in one. Another night after going out to eat, she jotted down, “hated myself.”

“She never said ‘help me’ to anybody I knew,” says a friend, in the documentary. But Radner did eventually help herself. In 1978, while “SNL” was on hiatus for the summer, she checked herself into New England Baptist Hospital in Boston. There, doctors imposed a strict 1,200-calorie-per-day diet to help her gain weight. Radner, as usual, kept a detailed diary of the two weeks she spent getting healthy.

“I weigh 104 pounds and I think I’m fat,” she wrote. “I want to learn how to eat normally again — and then perhaps to love normally and accept being loved.”

When Radner, on the mend, returned to New York later that summer, she wrote, “I am almost ready to tell food jokes again.” At her darkest moments, Radner stayed upbeat.

“Even in those journals, Gilda could write an entry that was really heartbreaking, but there would still be humor in it,” D’Apolito says. “There would still be something positive.”