Cloris Leachman was convinced she was dead. "I felt the outlines of my body and nothing was in it," she recalls. "I had no brains, no guts, no heart, no bones. This was heaven and I was dead and I was standing there."
Of course, she'd just been flung horizontally into the air -- gripped by a single arm and leg -- and twirled around by her dance partner, Corky Ballas, in an encore performance of their "Dancing With the Stars" routine on the talk show "The View." One could forgive an 82-year-old's deathly fright under such circumstances. "It was too scary. It was really frightening," Leachman says. "This time, he really got me. I went around eight times instead of two."
Leachman's unlikely seven-week stint as the oldest contestant ever on the hit TV show is just part of what the veteran actress calls her "master plan" for an octogenarian career comeback. Hatched about 18 months ago when her son George Englund Jr. became her manager, the rollout also includes a one-woman show that Leachman has been performing in theaters across the country and on cruise ships, and a new autobiography, "Cloris," which publishes Tuesday.
There have also been many amusing, if seemingly addled, performances on such talk shows as Jimmy Kimmel's (during which Leachman slipped off the chair and conducted her chat half-reclining on the ground) and an utterly profane appearance at a Comedy Central roast of Bob Saget. ("Here's something you didn't know about Mary," she joked of onetime costar Mary Tyler Moore, "when she had an orgasm, she threw her hat in the air.")
Leachman is giving Betty White a run for her money, with her new focus on becoming everybody's favorite nutty grandma. (Teen star Miley Cyrus, who wasn't even a zygote in Leachman's heyday, just asked her to appear on her "Hannah Montana" show.) Yet the uninhibited shtick is just that -- the gleeful comic stylings of a longtime professional, who has nine Emmys and an Academy Award.
She's not just going for laughs in this gonzo career comeback. She takes a serious turn in Quentin Tarantino's war movie "Inglourious Basterds," opening in August, and is also part of the all-star ensemble cast of "New York, I Love You," an anthology of love stories also coming this year.
Leachman began a recent visit over the remnants of breakfast at her favorite Brentwood diner, but about five minutes into the conversation, she grew so sleepy that she stretched out in the booth and put her head on the table. Seems she's been singing and playing the piano in her sleep (apparently, Broadway favorites from the '40s and '50s, which sounds kind of fun but actually makes for fitful rest).
