Katherine Helmond

The Convent and the Broadway Stage

Katherine Helmond was raised by nuns in a convent in Texas. She spent her afternoons cleaning the stage and dreaming of leaving there to act. She got there through sheer persistence. In the 1950s she was already working the New York theaters with no money to her name.

She wasn't seeking instant fame.

In 1973, she received a Tony nomination for her role in The Great God Brown. It was an important recognition for someone already past forty. But television had other plans for her career, and theater took a back seat.

Before making it to the big screen, she worked in local productions for a decade. That early experience gave her an enviable technical confidence in front of the camera.

The comedy that scandalized television

ABC premiered Soap in 1977. The series was a parody of soap operas that offended conservative groups even before its first episode aired. Helmond played Jessica Tate, a naive, wealthy woman who lived in a bubble of absolute surrealism.

But audiences connected with her right away. Her way of delivering the most absurd lines with total seriousness set her apart. She won the Golden Globe in 1981 for this character. Her face came to represent the smart comedy of the late seventies.

And the gamble paid off.

She appeared in 93 episodes of the series until it was canceled in 1981. The shoot was frantic, and she took it upon herself to review her co-stars' scripts so the pacing wouldn't falter. For Helmond, comedic timing was sacred and could not be improvised.

A Grandmother Who Didn't Knit

In 1984, she accepted the role of Mona Robinson on Who's the Boss?. It was a necessary change of pace. She played a grandmother with an active sex life who wore fitted designer clothes. She broke the mold of the older woman who existed only to babysit grandchildren in the television of the era.

She won her second Golden Globe in 1989 for this role. The show drew more than thirty million viewers in its best seasons. Yet she kept a very private life in Los Angeles with her husband.

She directed four episodes of the series between 1986 and 1989.

Despite her success on commercial television, she never abandoned strange projects. Filmmaker Terry Gilliam cast her in Time Bandits in 1981. But her most memorable collaboration was on Brazil in 1985. Helmond spent hours under layers of latex and glue to simulate extreme plastic surgery.

The result was a nightmarish image.

She was an actress of long shoots and steady contracts. Between 1995 and 1997, she appeared on the series Coach and later had a recurring role on Everybody Loves Raymond. On the latter, she worked for nine years playing Lois Whelan.

She voiced the character of Lizzie in the animated franchise Cars from 2006 to 2017. It was her last professional job before retiring from recording studios for good. She died on February 23, 2019, at her home in Los Angeles from complications of Alzheimer's. She was 89 years old at the time of her death.