If you only know Lainie Kazan from her role as the mother of the bride in "My Big Greek Wedding," then you don't know the story of one of the great showbiz survivors.

Lainie and I met for lunch a few days ago to talk about her upcoming three-day singing engagement at the Catalina Jazz Club in Hollywood beginning Thursday through Saturday. It will be her first local concert date in several years although she has been doing gigs in other parts of the country.

"I enjoy acting but singing is my passion, it's who I am," she tells me. "I play a role and I take a part of myself and I magnify that to play a specific character. When I'm singing, I'm who I am. It's very satisfying as an artist to express all of yourself. The humor, the pain, the pathos, the humanity and those sorts of things."

At the Catalina, Lainie will be singing mostly standards such as "I Didn't know What Time it Was," "Here's What I'm Here For."

"They asked me to sing in that room maybe 20 times and I turned it down," she said. "I didn't want to sing in LA and have that pressure on me. I'm going to have some fun with old material but treat it a different way. I'm looking forward to singing."

When you get the chance to talk with a star like Lainie, you want the dirt and I really wanted to know about was her time as understudy for Barbra Streisand in the original Broadway production of "Funny Girl" in the mid-60s.

She was happy to dish.

"It was very stressful," she remembered. "I had waited a year and about three or four months to go on for Barbra. I was in the show as well, I was a Zeigfeld show girl. I was there every night and I would just watch from above. Then one Tuesday afternoon I got a call and the stage manager said, 'You better run down here quick, Barbra's got strep throat. She's really, really sick,' So I came down and I rehearsed."

There was curiosity about Lanie in the media because everyone wanted to know how anyone could possibly understudy Barbra Streisand. So she had done many television, radio and newspaper interviews and
was told, "If you ever go on, call me."

So, she did.

"I had a list of everybody and I called everybody. At about 10 minutes before curtain, Barbra walked in and everyone [on the list] had showed up. She showed up to do the show because she felt better, all because she didn't want me to go on. So she got really, really sick and the next day, I went on twice. And that's all I ever did. But it has resounded for 40 years."

Things went very well during those two performances: "I was reviewed in Time Magazine and Newsweek, headlines all over the place. It launched me."

Lainie She became a major singing star and sang all over the world at such places as The Empire Room, The Persian Room and the Waldorf Astoria, worked with the likes of Frank Sinatra and Ethel Merman and guested many times on all the popular television variety shows of the day including those hosted by Ed Sullivan, Carol Burnett and Dean Martin with whom she appeared 26 times (see video below).

"I worked with everyone in those beginning years," Lainie said. "It was incredible. I had a great supper club career."

This led to movies. Her first film was 1968's "Dayton's Devil" with Leslie Neilsen and Rory Calhoun followed by "Lady in Cement" with Sinatra as part of his Tony Rome series.

She recalls the night she got the part: "I was working at the Eden Rock and he was working next door at the Fountain Blue [in Miami] and I got a message that he would love me to come see his show because he wanted to talk to me. I was opening for Don Rickles and my show was over exactly at 9 o'clock and he would go on exactly at 9 o'clock. And the message he sent to me was that he would hold his show for me. All his bodyguards picked me up at the Eden Rock, they got me backstage and they walked me down to ringside then the lights came down and he sang. It was an unbelievable experience. And then he invited me to his dressing room and he offered me a part in his movie. I had a small part but it was a thrill."

On My Big Fat Greek Wedding: "About a year before, I got a call from my agent who said, 'They're reading this little film written by a young Greek girl and it's at Tom Hanks' office. It might turn out to be something, why don't you go.' I said 'okay.' It was a nice little reading and most of the people who did the film were there. And when I left Tom Hanks said, 'If we ever do this movie, we'd like to be able to call on you.'" More than a year went by before she was called. "I had the best time, I met the greatest people. We became a family, truly a family. We still have lunch like once a month. It's a really great group of people. Nia was fabulous. It was unbelievable to be at the center of whatever that was. It was a shock! But you don't really realize what's happening when you're in it. People tell me they saw it seven or eight times. I have fans who are seven and fans who are 70 from that movie."

The movie was followed by a spinoff series "My Big Fat Greek Family" that reunited all of the cast with the exception of leading man John Corbett. Despite strong ratings at the start, it did not last more than a season.

"Nia didn't want it to go. She made a deal to do a series before the movie came out. They hired another cast, a totally different cast to do the series and had already made a pilot. And when the movie made over $100 million, they figured maybe the cast had something to do with it. But they never really allowed us to be who we really were in the movie. They were so afraid of being too ethnic, too this and too that. It just never flew."

MONDAY: Part two of my interview with Lainie Kazan includes the low point in her life and career in the 70s and how she re-invented herself. She also talks about her experience filming "Gigli" playing Ben Affleck's mother.

- For tons more more information about Lainie, go to LanieKazan.com.

- To find out about her Catalina Jazz Club show, go to the club's web site.

- Below is Lainie singing "Porgy" and "Trolley Song" on Dean Martin in the late 60s. She just blows me away in this clip: