The Morning Journal (Lorain, OH)
‘Who’s the Boss?’, ‘Soap’ actress dies
Actress Katherine Helmond, an Emmy-nominated and Golden Globe-winning actress, has died.
Actress Katherine Helmond, an Emmy-nominated and Golden Globe-winning actress who played two very different matriarchs on the ABC sitcoms “Who’s the Boss?” and “Soap,” has died, her talent agency said Friday.
Helmond died of complications from Alzheimer’s disease last Saturday at her home in Los Angeles, talent agency APA said in a statement.
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. “You were an instrumental part of my life. You taught me to hold my head above the marsh! You taught me to do anything for a laugh! What an example you were!”
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.
“We all lost a national treasure today,” Danza tweeted. “No words can measure my love.”
An only child raised by her mother and grandmother who began acting while a girl in Catholic school, Helmond began her professional career in theater 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.”