Carol Burnett Is So Glad We Had That Time Together

Most Hollywood legends attribute their gradual rises to fame to years of blood, sweat and tears. Carol Burnett says hers came from a series of miracles.

The litany of what she calls “divine accidents” starts in the one-bedroom Hollywood apartment Burnett shared with her grandmother. Rent was a dollar a day. With a year’s tuition at UCLA in 1951 costing $43 (there’s a reason we call them “the good old days”), enrolling was out of the question. Then one day, Burnett was sorting the mail when she found a letter with her name on it, but no return address. “I opened it up, and there was a $50 bill in there,” she says. “My tuition. It meant everything to me.” To this day, Burnett has no clue as to the identity of her mystery benefactor.

Once at UCLA, Burnett set her sights on a career in journalism, joining the staff of the Daily Bruin. But she found herself pulled into theater, even though she’d never done any acting in high school. “I had to do a scene and I did something light, because all my classmates picked this really dramatic stuff and I just couldn’t do that,” she recalls of her first-ever performance for a class. “I got a laugh. And I just thought, ‘Ooh, that’s kind of nice.’ That’s when I became interested in being a performer.”

In her junior year, Burnett performed a scene from Annie Get Your Gun for a professor’s party in San Diego. She was stuffing hors d’ouevres in her purse when an attendee offered her the deal of a lifetime. “He said, ‘I want you to take this $1,000 to go to New York. If you are successful, you must help people out,’” she says. “I thought it was the champagne talking. But that divine accident got me to Broadway.”

The rest, as they say, is history. There was The Carol Burnett Show and Annie, the Emmys (seven!), the special Tony, the Grammy, lots of other roles and awards. Now, Burnett has her sights set on something even bigger: her legacy. In November, she established the Carol Burnett Endowed Undergraduate Scholarship in Musical Theater at UCLA. The inaugural recipient, first-year musical theater student Alexa Cruz, won the award based on two performances from Burnett’s own repertoire: “Little Girls” from Annie (Burnett played the evil Miss Hannigan in the film version) and “Shy” from Once Upon a Mattress.

Along with creating the endowment, Burnett also donated the majority of her awards to UCLA. The one she calls her “most treasured” is now displayed prominently in the lobby of the Freud Playhouse: her 1952 “Most Promising Newcomer” award from the student theater-arts newspaper Spotlight. For Burnett, it’s the ultimate full-circle moment.

“I started out at UCLA, and I’m winding up there now,” she says, adding drolly, “There’s not much more to say.”

Except perhaps that, this time, it’s no divine accident. 

Read more from UCLA Magazine’s Winter 2026 issue.