Carol Burnett's 3 Daughters: All About Carrie, Jody and Erin

Carol Burnett has three children with ex-husband Joe Hamilton

Carol Burnett is both a comedy legend and a mother of three.

Burnett first rose to fame on Broadway and became a TV star in her groundbreaking series, The Carol Burnett Show, as well as a movie star with movies like Annie and Noises off. She was married three times; her first husband was her college sweetheart Don Saroyan, to whom she was married from 1955 to 1962. She married her second husband, Joe Hamilton, a producer on her show, in 1963, and together they had three daughters: Carrie, Jody and Erin. The couple divorced in 1984, and Burnett married musician Brian Miller in 2001.

After the 2016 SAG Awards, Burnett shared her story of being a young mother in the world of comedy. When she was pregnant with Jody, her friend Lucille Ball threw her a baby shower in style I love Lucy the star could.

“It was a black tie baby shower, with men in attendance!” Burnett said. “Her husband was comedian Gary Morton. He opened baby presents and did routines on everything. It was one of the funniest things ever.”

As a mom, Burnett always emphasized to her children the importance of following their own creative path. “I’ve always been asked why I don’t put my daughters on television,” Burnett said Interview magazine in 1978. “I always say, ‘Listen, my old lady didn’t have her own show. Let her get her own.'”

Despite this, all of the Burnett children found their way into the business: Carrie, who died in 2002, was an actress and writer; Jody is a film producer and podcast host; and Erin is a singer.

As her daughters grew up, she decided to be honest about her family’s history of addiction, starting with her parents. Since then, she has advocated for resources like Al-Anon and Alateen for those whose loved ones are struggling.

“They help you realize you’re not the problem,” Burnett told Marl Thomas about support groups. “You can’t cure them and you didn’t cause it. So you have to take care of yourself.”

Here’s everything you need to know about Carol Burnett’s children.

Carrie Louise Hamilton

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Burnett and Joe Hamilton’s eldest daughter, Carrie Louise Hamilton, was born in New York on December 5, 1963. Although Burnett was a Broadway star at the time, she did not become a true television celebrity until 1967 with the premiere of the film The Carol Burnett Show. But, as Burnett told Interview In 1978, her children weren’t actually watching her shows.

“Well, it depends on who the guests are,” she said. “They must have wanted to come on set when Steve Martin was a guest. My oldest is a real critic. I think they should bring the kids to the networks and let them watch things for their age group. The kids are so honest. They really tell it like it is.”

When Carrie was a teenager, she started taking drugs and drinking heavily. She went to rehab three times before getting sober. “I’m happy to say that she stopped using drugs, but during those three years it was hell,” Burnett told PEOPLE in 2016. “At one point I had to put her in rehab before she turned 18 and she hated me . She absolutely hated what I was doing to her.”

Carrie addressed her battle with addiction in an interview with PEOPLE in 1979. “I’ve always been Carol Burnett’s daughter,” the then 15-year-old said. “When I got high, I wasn’t me anymore. I wanted my image.”

Although mother and daughter had a strained relationship at the time, they eventually reconciled and became very close. Carrie excelled in music and acting, both of which she studied at Pepperdine University. She appeared in shows like Glory and movies like tokyo pop and sang with the band Big Business. She was married to musician Marko Templin from 1994 to 1998.

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Carrie and her mom collaborated on a play, Hollywood Armsbased on Burnett’s 1986 memoir Once more — but Carrie had never seen her work on stage. She was diagnosed with lung cancer in August 2001 and died of pneumonia caused by the cancer on January 20, 2002. She was 38 years old.

Hollywood Arms was scheduled to open at Chicago’s Goodman Theater that spring. In her grief, Burnett wanted to end it. “Carrie passed away and I… Well, I’m her mom and I didn’t want to get out of bed,” she later said during an appearance on the 2022 show. Dear Multi-Hyphenate podcast. However, her husband Miller encouraged her to continue. “And my husband — we were going for checkups — he said, ‘Carol, you don’t just owe this to Carrie, you owe it to [director Hal Prince] To complete.’ ”

Burnett recalled being on a plane to Chicago and asking her late daughter for a sign that she would be there in spirit. When she arrived at her hotel, a bouquet of birds of paradise was waiting for her. “[Carrie] had a bird of paradise tattooed on her right shoulder,” Burnett continued. “I called Hal and said, ‘How did you know? It was Carrie’s favorite flower.’ And he said: ‘I didn’t. I just called and told you to send something exotic to Carol’s room.’ ”

The next night at dinner, the restaurant gave her a free bottle of champagne. “The label said ‘Louise,'” Burnett said. “That was Carrie’s middle name and my mother’s name.”

Burnett’s connection to her late daughter is ever-present.

“She never leaves my side,” Burnett told PEOPLE in 2018. “I just feel her.”

The comedian expressed the same sentiment in her April 2023 PEOPLE cover story. “There’s not a day or hardly a moment that goes by that she’s not with me,” she said of Carrie. “We worked together, we laughed together, we cried together. It was a force.”

Jody Hamilton, 57

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Jody Hamilton, Burnett and Hamilton’s second child, was born in Los Angeles on January 18, 1967.

“My mom and dad were so cool,” her sister Erin told PEOPLE in 1999. “They wanted me and my sisters Carrie and Jody to go through whatever we had to go through to find out who we were.”

In the early 1980s, while Burnett and Hamilton were divorcing, they sent Jody and Erin to live with friends in Hawaii so they wouldn’t have to witness the dissolution of their marriage. “We all kind of knew it was happening,” Erin recalled. “We told them to do whatever they had to do to be happy.”

Jody now works as a film and TV producer. In 1998, she, Carrie and other artists founded an independent film company called Namethkuf. Carrie has written and directed two short films under the company.

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In 2001, Jody also produced a retrospective of Burnett’s early career titled Carol Burnett: Show Stoppers, which attracted more than 30 million viewers. The show aired a few months after Carrie was diagnosed with lung cancer. Burnett wanted to cancel at first, but Burnett’s co-star Tim Conway later told PEOPLE before she died, “Carrie was the one who said, ‘You have to do it, Mom.'”

Since 2014, Jody has been the co-host of the podcast From the Bunker. According to The Wall Street Journalshe and her husband, musician and songwriter Lonny Paul Johnson, live together in LA

Erin Kate Hamilton, 55

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Burnett and Hamilton’s youngest daughter, Erin Kate Hamilton, was born on August 14, 1968 in LA. In a 1999 interview with PEOPLE, she recalled what it was like growing up with her superstar mother and visiting the set of her mom’s show as a child. “I was mesmerized,” Erin said. “And she hypnotized me. But it seemed normal: ‘Oh, mom is playing dress-up.’ ”

After high school, Erin attended Bennington College in Vermont, but dropped out to accompany the Grateful Dead across the country on their tour. In the end she wanted more. “I decided I wanted to be the band people followed,” she said, “instead of always following the band.”

She became a professional singer, performing with jazz and blues bands before starting a solo career as a dance music artist. Her album One world debuted in 1999 and has since opened for artists such as Bette Midler and Whitney Houston.

In 1995, Erin married musician Trae Carlson; the couple had one son, Zachary, before divorcing in 1998. She then married Tony West, with whom she shares a son, Dylan.

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Erin has struggled with addiction for most of her adult life. In August 2020, Burnett and Miller filed for legal custody of Erin’s son Dylan due to “addiction issues and other circumstances” affecting Erin, according to a court filing.

“The guardianship will be for the purpose of supervision regarding his health, education and welfare and will not be intended to deny him or his parents adequate visitation with each other,” Burnett said in a statement to PEOPLE at the time. “We look forward to recovery being the next step towards normalization and request privacy at this time to allow that process to take place.”

Burnett and Miller were granted temporary custody of Dylan in September 2020. In 2022, a permanent guardian was appointed.

Ahead of her 90th birthday in 2023, Burnett reflected on the lessons she learned as a mother, saying, “Life can change on a dime. So just be grateful for what you have today.”

She also added about the legacy she hopes to leave behind: “I made people laugh, made them feel good when they might have been on the run. In my fan messages, many say it was the only time the family got together, to watch and laugh and that sometimes they were lonely and that our play cheered them up. That’s a good feeling.”

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Source: HIS Education