“My beautiful, kind, funny, gracious, compassionate, rock,” Milano wrote on Twitter. Katherine was a gift to our business and to the world, and will be deeply missed.”Īlyssa Milano, who played Helmond’s granddaughter, also paid tribute. “She taught me so much about life and inspired me indelibly by watching her work.
“Katherine Helmond was a remarkable human being and an extraordinary artist generous, gracious, charming and profoundly funny,” Light said in a statement to The Times. Light joined a number of celebrities who saluted Helmond on Friday. I don’t think it’s advisable or admirable.” And with age, there’s a tendency to revert to that - to pull back, recede. Women have been brought up to be passive, accepting, not come forward and play a major role in life.
We don’t have to just sit around and be invisible. “I’d really like to show women my age - who’ve had children grow up or lost husbands or retired after working all their lives - that there are options. “I wanted to show a woman my age who doesn’t fulfill the expectations of grandmother and mother and nice lady in Connecticut - but someone who’s in life, not outside looking in. Yeah, a contemporary woman,” Helmond told The Times in 1989. “I can be serious and I can be funny and vulnerable and blunt and brutal and loving.
After that, Helmond appeared in several short-lived series and movies, including “The Love Boat” and 1987’s “Overboard.”īut her eight-season run as the daffy, man-obsessed grandmother Mona Robinson alongside Tony Danza and Judith Light in “Who’s the Boss?” allowed her to play an unapologetic, contemporary woman not defined by age. “Soap” was canceled in 1981 after four seasons so that the network could cut its losses. Even though it caught on with viewers, the comedy’s commercial time had to be sold at fire-sale prices that failed to cover the production costs, according to Times reports. Several ABC affiliates declined to air the series and others delayed it until after 11:30 p.m. Her character had an African American butler named Benson, played by Guillaume, who became a breakout star of his own. Her own flirtatiousness - and affairs - was a punchline on the show. Helmond played Jessica, the naive and wealthy red-headed sister whose husband was an unabashed philanderer. The show was built around two sisters from different economic worlds. “Soap” pushed boundaries when it debuted in 1977, lampooning the often overwrought daytime soap operas that once crammed network schedules. The ABC comedy was boycotted by religious groups offended by the early press reports about the sexual content of the comedy series. In 1972, she won a Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle Award for her performance as Bananas in “The House of Blue Leaves,” and local producers began calling her.īut her TV career launched in the late ’70s, when she was cast as the daffy Jessica Tate on Susan Harris’ “Soap,” a prime-time soap opera parody that also starred Richard Mulligan, Robert Guillaume and Billy Crystal.