Fame arrived late for ‘Who’s the Boss’ star
KATHERINE Helmond was an Emmynominated and Golden Globewinning actress who played two very different matriarchs on ABC sitcoms Who’s the Boss? and Soap.
She died on February 23 of complications from Alzheimer’s disease at her home in Los Angeles. She was 89.
A native of Galveston, Texas, Helmond’s credits date back to the 1950s and she worked steadily in small roles through the decades. But her real fame, and all seven of her Emmy nominations, didn’t start arriving until she was nearly 50.
She was probably best known for playing Mona Robinson, Judith Light’s mother on Who’s the Boss?, which also starred Tony Danza and a young Alyssa Milano.
She won a best supporting Golden Globe for her work in 1989.
‘‘My beautiful, kind, funny, gracious, compassionate, rock,’’ Milano mourned on Twitter. On the show, Light was an uptight single mother who hired the 1980s heartthrob Danza to be her livein housekeeper, and Helmond was her foil, a lover of nightlife, pursuer of men and flaunter of sexuality who would have been at home on The Golden Girls, which ran during the same years.
‘‘Katherine Helmond was a remarkable human being and an extraordinary artist; generous, gracious, charming and profoundly funny,’’ Light said in a statement.
Danza tweeted: ‘‘We all lost a national treasure today. No words can measure my love.’’
An only child, raised by her mother and grandmother, who began acting while attending a Catholic school, Helmond began her professional career in theatre and returned to it often, earning a Tony Award nomination in 1973 for her Broadway role in Eugene O’Neill’s The Great God Brown.
She was a favorite of director Terry Gilliam, who put her in his films Brazil, Time Bandits, and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.
In Brazil, a dystopian comedy from 1985, she played a surgeryaddicted woman whose elastic face became one of the most memorable images from the cult film.
Her major break came with Soap, a parody of soap operas that aired from 1977 to 1981. She played wealthy matriarch Jessica Tate, one of two main characters on the show, which costarred Robert Guillaume and was also a breakthrough for Billy Crystal, who played her nephew.
She was nominated for Emmys for all four seasons of the show and won a best actress in a comedy Golden Globe in 1981.
Helmond kept working into her 80s doing mostly voice work, most notably as the Model T Lizzie in the Pixar Cars films.
She had a recurring role on Everybody Loves Raymond from 1996 to 2004 as the title character’s motherinlaw.
She is survived by her husband of 57 years, David Christian, and her halfsister, Alice Parry. — AP