(Very) late bloomer

An energized little old lady behind the wheel drives her way to acting success.

By ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published April 1, 2007

SANTA MONICA, Calif. - Hollywood's starmakers always are on the lookout for a fresh new face, and they found one in Mae Laborde, albeit a fresh new face of the wrinkled variety.

Laborde, 97, is just four years into her acting career, and she's hotter than ever. Standing 4 feet 10, with snow-white hair, rosy red cheeks and a sweet-as-peaches-and-cream smile, she's becoming TV's ubiquitous grandma.

She was Wheel of Fortune's Vanna White (40 years in the future) for a recent episode of MADtv. She was the stunned fiancee whose boyfriend finally gets around to proposing in a jewelry commercial. She faced down the Grim Reaper in a bit about elderly people without health insurance for Real Time With Bill Maher.

She has also been a cheerleader on ESPN, appeared in a Lexus commercial, had a recurring role on Spike Feresten's Talkshow and had a role in a JP Morgan Chase Bank commercial.

"Now that one paid good!" says Laborde, eyes twinkling as she sits perched on the living room couch of her small Southern California home, a couple of blocks from the beach. Lowering her voice conspiratorially, she adds, "I mean like a few hundred dollars."

'I'm just a natural'

What's the secret to her newfound success? She has never had training, and until four years ago, the closest she had come to show business was working as a bookkeeper in late bandleader Lawrence Welk's office. "I'm just a natural," she says with a broad smile as she heads to her dining room table to sift through some of her press clippings.

Her acting career was started by a 2002 Los Angeles Times story, when columnist Steve Lopez, a former neighbor, decided to seek her out for some lighthearted driving tips.

In those days she was well known around Santa Monica as the little old lady who barreled up and down her neighborhood's hilly streets and across the freeways in a gigantic 1977 Oldsmobile Delta 88. Laborde, who stopped driving last year, was so small, and the car so big, Lopez wrote, that behind the wheel she looked like a cricket driving a tank.

His description caught the eye of Sherri Spillane, a veteran talent agent and ex-wife of late crime novelist Mickey Spillane. Spillane decided she had to meet Laborde. The two got together for a tea-leaf reading (Laborde's hobby), and the next thing Spillane knew, she had a new client.

Eager to audition

"She's got this way about her that's so endearing that everybody falls in love with her," Spillane says. "She's got that cute little face, and she's very funny."

As the years have passed, Laborde has worked at one job or another. She has outlived her husband, Nicholas, and their only child, Shirley.

When she was 89, Laborde took a police training course just for fun, and she still cooks for herself, paints and raises garden tomatoes that she sells to a local restaurant.

But she'll drop whatever she's doing when there's a call for an audition.

Recently, she landed a small role in a forthcoming movie opposite Ben Stiller. She'll be the grandmotherly lady sitting in a restaurant near Stiller and his girlfriend as they speculate what their lives will be like at that age.

"I don't know anyone else her age that could keep up with her," says Spillane, who has become her agent and close friend.

"But then, I don't know anyone else her age," Spillane adds, laughing.

[Last modified April 1, 2007, 01:00:02]