Actress brought blend of innocence and sexuality to a series of TV comedy roles
Katherine Helmond, who has died from Alzheimer’s complications aged 89, made her name playing endearingly naive, yet lusty women in the TV comedies Soap and Who’s the Boss?. After beginning her career in theatre, she found greater success later in television, playing comic characters who were alternately naive, sexually aggressive, greedy or stiffly proper. On the cult-favourite Soap ,a spoof of daytime soap operas, she played Jessica Tate, a sheltered wife blind to her husband’s infidelities.
With a girlish voice and revealing blouses, she brought an unusual blend of earnestness, innocence and sexual frankness to her role. She was nominated four times for an
Emmy but did not win.
Her character’s nephew
Jodie Dallas (played by Billy Crystal) was among the first openly gay characters in a prime-time sitcom. When trying to understand her nephew, Helmond’s character was caught somewhere between shock and befuddlement.
‘‘You know, Jodie, when we were young, there were no such thing as homosexuals,’’ she said in one episode.
‘‘Yes, there were, Aunt Jessica,’’ Crystal’s character replied. ‘‘Homosexuals go way back in history.’’
Helmond: ‘‘Who?’’
Crystal: ‘‘Alexander the Great was gay, Plato was gay.’’
Helmond: ‘‘Plato?’’
As Crystal nodded, Helmond said, in an alarmed voice: ‘‘Mickey Mouse’s dog was gay?’’
Throughout its four-year run, Soap was the frequent target of moral outrage and religious condemnation. ‘‘It was ahead of its time, with issues that had never been on TV before,’’ Helmond told the San Francisco Chronicle in
1990. ‘‘One of the biggest objections was having a homosexual as a major role and showing him in a good light, with a family that totally accepted him.’’
Helmond’s next major starring role came on Who’s the Boss?, in which she was originally scheduled to have a limited part, but her character proved so irresistible that she appeared in all 196 episodes of the show, which ran from 1984 to 1992.
Her character, Mona Robinson, was a freespirited, sexually adventurous middle-aged woman who lived near her daughter, a divorced, uptight advertising executive, played by Judith Light. The show’s other central character was a onetime baseball player (Tony Danza) working as a housekeeper for Light’s character.
It wasn’t exactly Shakespeare or Eugene O’Neill – whose works Helmond had performed on stage – but Who’s the Boss? allowed her to be carefree, adventurous and bawdy. (She also had ample opportunity to show off her hourglass figure in skimpy outfits, as she fell in and out of the arms of countless men.)
The show was among the first sitcoms to feature an overtly flirtatious, sexually active middle-aged woman. ‘‘Mother, you’re wearing a bathing suit,’’ Light’s character says in one episode. ‘‘I mean, isn’t it a little revealing?’’ Helmond: ‘‘I certainly hope so.’’
Helmond later played a money-grabbing owner of a professional football team on the sitcom Coach. From 1996 to 2004, she had a recurring role on Everybody Loves Raymond, as the pretentious mother of Debra Barone, wife of the show’s title character.
Katherine Marie Helmond was born in Galveston, Texas. Her parents divorced when she was young, and she was raised by her mother and grandmother.
She never formally studied acting, but she joined community theatre companies in Houston and Dallas, working the lights and curtains and ‘‘everything I could to be in the theatre’’. She held secretarial jobs, ran a theatre in the Catskill Mountains and taught acting while building her career.
She received a Tony Award nomination in 1973 for her role as a woman caught in a love triangle in a Broadway revival of Eugene O’Neill’s The Great God Brown. But when she went to Hollywood in the 1970s, she had a hard time finding work. ‘‘They all thought I played classics, queens and things like that. Now the opposite is true, now that I’ve had three comedic parts in long-running sitcoms. The casting directors say, ‘Well, she can’t do serious parts.’ ’’
In addition to television, Helmond appeared in several films, including Time Bandits (1981), Brazil (1985) and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.
Her marriage to George N Martin ended in divorce. Survivors include her husband of nearly 50 years, David Christian.
When she helped run a theatre in upstate New York, she invited her grandmother from Texas to a production of Macbeth. ‘‘We had a bagpipe player and dogs barking and chickens on stage,’’ Helmond told the Boston Globe. ‘‘My grandmother said, ‘Why would you want to do a play like that?’ I said, ‘Grandma, it’s one of the greatest plays in the English language,’ and she said, ‘That’s no excuse, kid.’ ’’ – Washington Post
‘‘One of the biggest objections was having a homosexual as a major role and showing him in a good light.’’
Katherine Helmond on the outrage caused by Soap