{"id":606278,"date":"2026-08-27T14:26:15","date_gmt":"2026-08-27T14:26:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/606278\/"},"modified":"2026-08-27T14:26:15","modified_gmt":"2026-08-27T14:26:15","slug":"miss-piggy-is-our-last-movie-star","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/606278\/","title":{"rendered":"Miss Piggy Is Our Last Movie Star"},"content":{"rendered":"

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I am a blonde because of three women: my mother, Lil\u2019 Kim, and Miss Piggy. The last in particular has shaped my understanding of womanhood and its possibilities since I was a child in the \u201990s; every holiday season, I admired her aggressive and assured demeanor as our home wore out the VHS tape of The Muppet Christmas Carol<\/a>. I am not alone in my estimation of Miss Piggy.<\/p>\n

\u201cFor me, growing up, there was a woman who I just related to. She just felt very strong. She had a really specific POV. She asked for what she wanted. She always had good jokes. And that woman was Miss Piggy,\u201d Amy Poehler said last spring on an episode of Las Culturistas. Her comment was met with shrieks from Bowen Yang and praise from Matt Rogers. After Tim Curry\u2019s death this week, a clip <\/a>of the actor talking about his affair with Miss Piggy on the set of Muppet Treasure Island began to circulate: \u201cOnce you\u2019ve had pork, you never go back.\u201d On Poehler\u2019s own podcast this year, the actress Da\u2019Vine Joy Randolph said, \u201cThat lady, I am who I am today because of her. At a young age, that being instilled in you: You don\u2019t take shit from men. You do your thing. Be fabulous.\u201d She added, \u201cThat\u2019s my girrrlll.\u201d During Sabrina Carpenter\u2019s Short n\u2019 Sweet tour, Miss Piggy made a cameo<\/a> as the celebrity who got \u201carrested\u201d during the singer\u2019s last show. The crowd\u2019s response was uproarious. Jennifer Lawrence and Emma Stone are spearheading a new Miss Piggy\u2013focused movie<\/a>, set to be written by Cole Escola. When asked by W magazine<\/a> earlier this year if she would be playing the diva, Stone scoffed in disbelief: \u201cFirst of all, that is the biggest insult to Miss Piggy I have ever heard, and I will not have her name dragged through the mud, I\u2019m sorry. Why would I play a literal star?\u201d She continued, \u201cOf course I\u2019m not playing Miss Piggy \u2026 Miss Piggy is playing Miss Piggy.\u201d Who else could?<\/p>\n

To say Miss Piggy is having a moment would be inaccurate. Since the mid-1970s, she\u2019s been a cultural icon, bridging the gap between comedy and the world of fashion. She\u2019s been dressed by Marc Jacobs, Donna Karan, Vivienne Westwood, and Zac Posen, among others. She has reported from New Year\u2019s Eve ceremonies and written a best-selling book. She\u2019s appeared on the covers of Elle, Life, and even New York in 2011. But Miss Piggy is the last woman movie star. She is part of a lineage that has gone dormant: larger-than-life, carefully curated personas bolstered both by their market value at the box office and by how their sheer artistry shapes the texts that end up on the silver screen. These are women like Elizabeth Taylor, Joan Crawford, Bette Davis, and Mae West. During their reign in Hollywood\u2019s Golden Age, their lives and cinematic work played out ideals about femininity and its expectations in American culture writ large. It\u2019s a legacy Miss Piggy carries on.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\n With Sabrina Carpenter in The Muppet Show 2026 special.
\n Photo: YouTube\n <\/p>\n

Miss Piggy has spent the past five decades building an image of delightful contradictions: She\u2019s glamorous and insecure, bold and vulnerable, domineering and high femme. Whether sparring with Joan Rivers on Fashion Police in 2012 while wearing Louboutins (\u201cPlease, Joan, have some dignity. Or did it get sucked out the last time you had lipo?\u201d); yearning for romance with her on-again, off-again beau, Kermit the Frog; or asking Carpenter if she\u2019s wearing her wig in The Muppet Show 2026 special, Miss Piggy has made these contradictions into high comedic art.<\/p>\n

Her presence is an argument: A woman can make herself into her greatest artistic work. Being full of yourself isn\u2019t detrimental but necessary for survival. Humor is a means of self-definition. Within the oeuvre of the Muppets\u2019 cinematic and televisual work, Miss Piggy hasn\u2019t ever wholly been a punch line \u2014 her image is too dexterous for that. But aspects of her persona have been. Consider the 1982 song \u201cSnackcercise,\u201d featured on Miss Piggy\u2019s Aerobique Exercise Workout Album. In the video, dressed in the workout gear du jour, Miss Piggy lounges while dancers flank her. \u201cI maintain my dynamite figure with a daily a\u00e9robique workout,\u201d she explains. \u201cNow you go to your refrigerator and get your exercise equipment and get ready to snackcercise.\u201d Workout moves like \u201cbanana splits\u201d advise one to \u201clift the dish, grab the spoon, take a bite and chew, chew, chew, chew, swallow.\u201d Her weight and notable appetite are integral to the musical number. But something has shifted within this decade. The Miss Piggy attributes that were once gags are now the very aspects of her character that millennials (and, to a lesser extent, younger Gen-Xers) deify her for.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\"Muppet <\/p>\n

\n From left: One of her first appearances in 1975. Photo: YouTubeIn The Great Muppet Caper from 1981. Photo: Hulton Archive\/Getty Images\n <\/p>\n

\n From top: One of her first appearances in 1975. Photo: YouTubeIn The Great Muppet Caper from 1981. Photo: Hulton Archive\/Getty Images\n <\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\n From left: With Joan Rivers on Fashion Police in 2012. Photo: YouTubeWith Gloria Steinem receiving a feminist award in 2015. Photo: Brooklyn Museum\n <\/p>\n

\n From top: With Joan Rivers on Fashion Police in 2012. Photo: YouTubeWith Gloria Steinem receiving a feminist award in 2015. Photo: Brooklyn Museum\n <\/p>\n

One of the earliest incarnations of Miss Piggy was an unnamed, blonde, beady-eyed puppet in 1975\u2019s The Muppet Show: Sex and Violence who spoke in a nasally whine during a film parody, \u201cReturn to Beneath the Planet of the Pigs.\u201d By the time The Muppet Show premiered the next year, Miss Piggy was reborn. She was given a distinctive look by designer Bonnie Erickson: a flowing gown, satin opera gloves, and large light-blue eyes framed by thick eyelashes. She is one of the few Muppets with irises, which go a long way toward making her seem human. And thanks to her puppeteer Frank Oz, who performed the character from early in her history until the beginning of the aughts, her highly romantic and vivacious personality came to life. What\u2019s fascinating about Miss Piggy\u2019s journey from chorus girl in 1976 to Muppets star is how quickly her persona coalesced once Jim Henson & Co. saw her potential.<\/p>\n

In the 1979 New York Times article \u201cThe Muppets in Movieland,\u201d pegged to the then-upcoming fourth season of The Muppet Show, Oz shares her origin story: Miss Piggy \u201cgrew up in a small town; her father died when she was young; her mother wasn\u2019t that nice to her. She had to enter beauty contests to survive. She has a lot of aggressiveness, but she needs a lot to survive \u2014 as many single women do. She has a lot of vulnerability, which she has to hide, because of her need to be a superstar.\u201d All her fabulousness comes with a current of complication and sorrow: \u201cAlthough Miss Piggy\u2019s essentially humorous, to me she\u2019s had a sad, difficult, painful life,\u201d Oz says. On a class level, Miss Piggy is a striver, a self-made woman who acts as an argument for the power of self-determination.<\/p>\n

In the 1981 film The Great Muppet Caper, we see this self-determination in action. Haughty fashion designer Lady Holiday (Diana Rigg) is talking about the failure of recent designs: \u201cWe have to make drastic changes in the new line before the show tomorrow. All my girls are going around looking like barnyard animals.\u201d Off-camera, someone clears their throat.<\/p>\n

\u201cGood heavens, who are you?\u201d asks Lady Holiday. That someone is Miss Piggy. Blonde hair flowing. Pearls gleaming. She casts a saucy gaze from beneath a white hat with pink florals. Her dress is white, magenta, and burgundy, matching her hat. She poses, leaning against the door. \u201cMy name is Miss Piggy, and I would like to be a high-fashion model.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cDoesn\u2019t surprise me. Seems to be the way we\u2019re heading,\u201d Lady Holiday volleys, but Miss Piggy is undeterred.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019ve always dreamed of being a Holiday model,\u201d she says. \u201cMay I come in?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cAbsolutely not.\u201d<\/p>\n

Miss Piggy comes in anyway. She practically hops around the desk.<\/p>\n

\u201cMay I show you my portfolio?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cNo.\u201d<\/p>\n

Miss Piggy plops her black-cover portfolio on the desk: \u201cGood. Here.\u201d Noticing Lady Holiday\u2019s trepidation, Miss Piggy says, \u201cYou may open it.\u201d Lady Holiday listlessly turns the pages, barely glancing at Miss Piggy in various outfits.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is me reeking grandeur. Being aloof. Being demure,\u201d Miss Piggy narrates. \u201cAh\u201d \u2014 her voice drops a few octaves from its typical prissy, preening softness \u2014 \u201cDaring.\u201d While the clothes change, her pose and expression remain the same.<\/p>\n

\u201cInteresting range of emotions,\u201d Lady Holiday says sarcastically.<\/p>\n

Miss Piggy is as confident as ever: \u201cModeling is my life. It is my destiny. I shall accept nothing less.\u201d She gets a job as a receptionist and screams with pleasure at the prospect. One step closer to her goal of stardom.<\/p>\n

Oz once said his way of understanding Miss Piggy was she\u2019s a \u201ctruck driver wanting to be a woman.\u201d These rough-hewn aspects of Miss Piggy\u2019s femininity feel incongruous only if you believe a woman\u2019s natural state is to be coy and demure, that things happen to you but you never drive the action. It\u2019s the way Miss Piggy renders her femininity as an arch spectacle, twisting expectations by incorporating notes culturally associated with the masculine, that makes her a star. A movie star isn\u2019t merely a title bestowed upon those whose box-office numbers back it up. A star affects the reading of a film as much as the cinematography, direction, and costume design. And a true one turns their contradictions into a cohesive art form.<\/p>\n

Miss Piggy\u2019s greatest ancestor in this regard is Mae West. With a career spanning seven decades, starting in vaudeville before turning toward pre\u2013Hays Code Hollywood, West established her stardom her own damn self as an actress, comedian, screenwriter, and playwright. Her first lead role on Broadway was in the 1926 play Sex, which she also wrote. Her work was so incendiary she was arrested for it. She battled censorship onstage and onscreen to explore sexuality and femininity in all its colorful, bawdy permutations. She liked her necklines low and gowns tight on her Rubenesque frame. F. Scott Fitzgerald is said to have deemed her the \u201conly Hollywood actress with both an ironic edge and a comic spark.\u201d I\u2019m partial to how West herself put it: \u201cIt isn\u2019t what I do but how I do it. It isn\u2019t what I say but how I say it. And how I look when I do it and say it.\u201d<\/p>\n

It would be easy to stop at the superficial similarities between these outsize characters: blonde, petite in height but full-figured, defined by their appetites. But Miss Piggy and Mae West share an interesting tension: West was inspired by female impersonators, including Bert Savoy, who was a figure in The Greenwich Village Follies, a musical revue from 1919 through the 1920s. She plucked inspiration from his campy excess for her signature strut. In the 1930s, West was simultaneously deemed the \u201cSiren of Sex and Sensation\u201d and, by a writer in Vanity Fair, \u201cthe greatest female impersonator of all time.\u201d It\u2019s femininity through the looking glass. Miss Piggy, too, is the product of female impersonators. There is a friction between the earnestness of the character, her cutting humor, her radical femininity, and the fact that only men have performed her: first Oz and then, after he mostly stepped away from his work with the Muppets in 2001, Eric Jacobson, who has performed her ever since.<\/p>\n

Jacobson is a 55-year-old with a gentle countenance who has been with his wife since they met when she was a production assistant on Sesame Street. He wasn\u2019t initially a Miss Piggy acolyte. \u201cI did not grow up with Miss Piggy as my favorite character from the Muppets,\u201d he tells me. \u201cI was more of a Kermit guy. More of a Fozzie Bear guy. As a child, I was drawn to characters that I thought I could be friends with or that I wanted to be like. And Miss Piggy, she was just a little too much for me.\u201d It was only over the years, as he matured as a human being and performer, that he became enamored: \u201cI saw all the fascinating complexities to the character and became a huge fan of hers.\u201d<\/p>\n

Jacobson does a lot of improv as Miss Piggy \u2014 and he\u2019s especially able to cut loose on live television and in other less-scripted appearances. (Leigh Slaughter, vice-president of the Muppets Studio, noted that for the performers, scripts are sometimes more suggestions than rule of law.) It is during Jacobson\u2019s tenure that Miss Piggy\u2019s image has become an emblem of empowerment and prowess for her women and queer audiences, although prior viewers were starting to glean the nuances of the character. In her 1995 book, The Unruly Woman: Gender and the Genres of Laughter, Kathleen Rowe Karlyn writes, \u201cIn Miss Piggy\u2019s Guide to Life, a mock self-help and etiquette book, Miss Piggy borrows Cosmopolitan magazine\u2019s style of using imperatives and checklists (\u2018do this, check that\u2019) to tell women how to improve themselves. On the surface, she seems to accept the norms of femininity. But when she tells women how they can \u2018snack\u2019 their way to \u2018slimness,\u2019 she abandons Cosmo\u2019s line on deferred gratification in favor of the pleasure principle, mocking the bourgeois Protestant ethic of work and investment that pervades women\u2019s magazines and that helps support the identity of self-sacrifice and masochism with femininity.\u201d<\/p>\n

In 2015, the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum presented Miss Piggy with a Sackler Center First Award. The ceremony can be found on YouTube<\/a> and includes Gloria Steinem lavishing the character with praise. Jacobson was initially resistant to the award: \u201cI thought, Surely there must be any number of actual women out there who would be more deserving of a feminist award than a fictional character \u2014 and, on top of that, one who\u2019s performed by a man.\u201d But Jacobson came around. He says women came up to him to tell him how deeply Miss Piggy inspired them. \u201cAnd that\u2019s when I realized, Wow, this character is so much more than just a character \u2014 and just how important symbols can be to a society.\u201d<\/p>\n

The public perception of Miss Piggy has continued changing; she\u2019s become a signifier of confidence rather than female delusion. The artisans and producers at the Muppets Studio are well aware of this fact. \u201cMiss Piggy\u2019s delusions of grandeur have been somewhat accepted and even reinforced by the media and by different people. It\u2019s become more of a challenge to play her as delusional, which is a really important aspect to her character. So many people now have bought into her delusions: that she\u2019s a big star and a true talent,\u201d Jacobson says. It has led to a challenge for him and the bevy of people who bring her to life. \u201cWe have to find new ways to make her even more over the top,\u201d he says. \u201cIt\u2019s fun because it just pushes us to be more absurdist. And that\u2019s part of the DNA of the Muppets.\u201d It also comes through in what she wears and how she carries herself. \u201cWe like to say \u2018Those pearls are not real,\u2019\u201d Dani Iglesias, the Muppets Studio creative director, tells me. \u201cShe would never let anyone know that. But it\u2019s that sense of showmanship, of wanting to project the idea of what it is to be a diva and a successful actress and fashionista that drives a lot of the decisions we make for her wardrobe. There\u2019s that Coco Chanel saying of \u2018Get dressed and then take one accessory off.\u2019 Miss Piggy is the opposite, and she would put three more on.\u201d<\/p>\n

Miss Piggy\u2019s influence thrives in the present through characters like Cole Escola\u2019s Mary Todd Lincoln in Oh, Mary! There\u2019s a glint of Miss Piggy\u2019s quick wit in the comedic edge and blonde ambitions of Jennifer Coolidge. I also see Miss Piggy in Jennifer Tilly. Whether stunting on The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills or embodying the homicidal sex symbol Tiffany Valentine in the Chucky franchise, Tilly is a distinctively voiced, exceedingly attractive representation of what confidence can get a woman who strives to move beyond her fraught beginnings. But unlike these flesh-and-blood examples, Miss Piggy doesn\u2019t experience the discrimination of aging. She\u2019s seasoned, yes. (I\u2019ve always felt she\u2019s in her mid-to-late 40s.) But she\u2019s also ageless. If a woman star lives long enough, she may get lucky, like Barbra Streisand and Cher, in that the aspects of themselves deemed too much in the middle of their careers become worthwhile and beloved in their 40s and 50s. Miss Piggy will never receive retaliation from her audience for not existing in life as the unchanging fantasy they hold in their minds. She won\u2019t have a partner whose mistreatment tarnishes her goddesslike image. That\u2019s the bittersweet undercurrent of her fame: She can reach a level of consistent public adoration and respect that no living woman would ever be able to embody. After all, flesh has its complications. But Miss Piggy is a star nodding to an era in which women were much more than they\u2019re allowed to be now: vivid, dynamic, larger than life. Shirking relatability for something mythic. She is one of our last. And the rest of the world is finally realizing it.<\/p>\n

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\n If you prefer to read in print, you can also find this article in the August 24, 2026, issue of
\n New York\u00a0Magazine.<\/p>\n

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