‘Feud’ actress revels in Mamacita
Jackie Hoffman, who embodied Hollywood legend Joan Crawford’s long-suffering maid, Mamacita, in FX’s “Feud,” shared a few more details about the frowning fraulein who stole scene after scene in Ryan Murphy’s miniseries.
“There wasn’t much out there, and what little that was out there, that was sent to me and that I Googled, was from a book that Joan Crawford called ‘Joan Crawford: My Way of Life,’ ” Hoffman said when she stopped by The Los Angeles Times.
Incidentally, Hoffman, who has appeared in “The New Normal,” “Gilmore Girls” and the viral “Old Lady Gaga” video, had read the book in her 20s and passed on a bit of her knowledge when she sat down for our chat.
Here are a few Mamacita morsels, as well as a handful of secrets from the set:
Mamacita’s real name was Anna Marie Brinke. She was German, but Crawford (played by Jessica Lange in the series) started calling her Mamacita after “she heard people using the term in Portugal.”
She had nine children, who were grown by the time she started working for Crawford.
“She didn’t speak English, she only spoke German, and there was a lot of pantomime” between the women, Hoffman said. That’s why Crawford flung objects at Mamacita, and she quit before she “got tired of having things thrown at her.”
There were two vasethrowing episodes, and “there were a total of eight sugar-glass vases thrown at her,” Hoffman said, and Lange did all of her own throwing.
Hoffman is much younger than Crawford’s domestic servant in the series. “There was a scene that they cut, and there was a moment where, I think, I peel Jessica up off the floor after she’s been boozing and I take her to bed, and she says, ‘Thank you, Mamacita, you’re the mother I always wanted’ and I say, ‘I’m only two years older than you, but OK,’ ” Hoffman said. Hoffman is Team Bette. Despite “the Bavarian ballast’s” stoic appearance and the limited physicality she was allowed, Hoffman was “amazed and delighted and surprised at the range of stuff that I got to do.”
Hoffman got to keep Mamacita’s thick-framed glasses: “The whole thing was done with such taste and such elegance, and I told everyone that I licked every object on that set.”