It’s been 34 years since Rosie O’Donnell worked with the late great Penny Marshall on the 1992 classic A League of Their Own. In a new interview, O’Donnell is speaking out to reveal the advice that Marshall gave her on the set of this movie.
O’Donnell Recalls Working With Marshall
O’Donnell, 63, was recently interviewed on the podcast We Can Do Hard Things with Glennon Doyle. There, O’Donnell remembered her time working with Marshall, who directed the 1992 baseball movie. According to O’Donnell, Marshall was a “woman’s sports freak” who was also a “feminist.”
“I think she didn’t like to think of herself as a feminist. [Marshall] was older than me, and I don’t know that she wasn’t an ardent feminist like me,” O’Donnell recounted. “She was kind of a closeted feminist in some ways. She didn’t necessarily want to have the banner, but she really supported women and women’s sports and women athletes in a way [like] no one else that I had met.”
O’Donnell described Marshall as being “very athletic.” This stemmed from the fact that Marshall was the daughter of a dance instructor.
“It was all her vision,” O’Donnell stated. “And I think she made a profound impact on women’s sports in the history of the United States because of that movie. I mean, I see little kids coming to my door dressed as me [for Halloween], and they don’t know. After they leave, my daughter will say, ‘Mommy, they didn’t even know that you’re Doris Murphy.’ I’m like, ‘I know, I know. They don’t know.”
Marshall’s Advice For O’Donnell
O’Donnell played Doris in the 1992 film. She remembers one scenbe in which her character is on the bus with the rest of the women. In it, Doris says that she “never felt like a real girl.” She’s never forgotten having a hilarious exchange with Marshall about this specific moment.
“It’s funny, when I did that scene on the bus where I said — it was written. I didn’t make it up — but, you know, ‘I never felt like a real girl or a normal girl.’ And then, you know, ‘There’s a lot of us and I think we’re okay,'” O’Donnell revealed. “So after I did that take, Penny said, ‘Rosie, do it again, but don’t do it so gay.'”
“She goes, ‘You’re doing it kind of gay,'” she added. “And I thought, ‘It’s a gay [expletive] speech, what do you expect?’ But I didn’t say that to her.”
O’Donnell ended up doing the speech again in “the exact same way.” This time, she got Marshall’s approval.
O’Donnell Doubles Down
“But that was the… to me, that’s what that speech said,” she continued. O’Donnell explained that she grew up at a time when Billie Jean King and Martina Navratilova had to address their sexual orientation in press conferences.
“I remember it wounding me as a kid, like feeling like, ‘Oh my god it’s such a bad thing that they can’t even say it,'” she lamented. “It really had a profound effect on me the fact that it was so foreboden, that nobody could even talk about it in any way.”
“So I was sure when I did that scene to make it as gay as I could,” O’Donnell explained. “I think my character was madly in love with Mae, who was a straight girl but… that’s how i played it. I was madly in love with her and you know, would do whatever she wanted, and to be near her, and that was enough.”
Marshall sadly passed away back in 2018 at the age of 75. Meanwhile, O’Donnell fled the country last year over the second presidential victory of Donald Trump. She has since settled in Ireland, where she remains to this day.
Whether you like O’Donnell or not, it can’t be denied that A League of Their Own is a true classic. They sadly don’t make movies quite like that one anymore!