NEW YORK (AP) — Polly Holliday, a Tony Award-nominated display and stage actor who turned the catchphrase “Kiss my grits!” right into a nationwide retort because the gum-chewing, beehive-wearing waitress aboard the long-running CBS sitcom “Alice,” has died. She was 88.
Holliday died Tuesday at her dwelling in New York, mentioned her theatrical agent, Dennis Aspland. She was the final surviving member of the principal solid of “Alice;” Linda Lavin, who performed the title character, died final yr.
“Alice” ran from 1976 to 1985, however Holliday had became such a star that the community gave her her personal short-lived spin-off known as “Flo” in 1980. It lasted a yr.
Holliday earned 4 Golden Globe nominations and gained one in 1980 for “Alice,” in addition to 4 Emmy Award nominations, three for “Alice” and one for “Flo.”
As for the “Kiss my grits!” line, the Alabama-born Holliday was fast to distance herself from it, telling interviewers that the road was “pure Hollywood” and never a regional saying. However she recognized with Flo.
“She was a Southern girl you see in a variety of locations,” she informed The Sarasota Herald-Tribune in 2003. “Not well educated, but very sharp, with a sense of humor and a resolve not to let life get her down.”
Holliday’s profession included stints on Broadway — together with a Tony nod reverse Kathleen Turner in a 1990 revival of “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” — and plenty of TV, together with taking part in the blind sister to Betty White’s character in “Golden Girls.” On the large display, her credit included John Grisham 1995 authorized thriller sequence “The Client” and portraying a protecting secretary in “All the President’s Men.”
Her Broadway credit embrace “All Over Town” in 1974 directed by Dustin Hoffman, “Arsenic and Old Lace” in 1986 with Jean Stapleton and Abe Vigoda, and a revival of “Picnic” with Kyle Chandler in 1994.
A few of her extra memorable credit embrace the depraved Mrs. Deagle in “Gremlins,” Tim Allen’s sassy mother-in-law on “Home Improvement” and off-Broadway in “A Quarrel of Sparrows,” by which The New York Occasions mentioned she radiated “a refreshingly touching air of willed, cheerful imperturbability.”
