Polly Holliday, the adaptable actress who was best known for playing the brash but amiable Flo on the long-running sitcom “Alice,” and who also pursued a notable stage career for decades, died on Tuesday at her home in Manhattan. She was 88.
Her death was confirmed by Dennis Aspland, her theatrical agent and friend. It came less than a year after the death of Linda Lavin, who played the show’s title character.
Viewers of “Alice” could tell when Flo, a gum-chewing Southern diner waitress with attitude, was perturbed. She’d pause momentarily, address the offender in the sweetest, most dulcet tones and then suggest, deadpan, “Kiss my grits.”
In the series, which was loosely based on Martin Scorsese’s 1974 film “Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore” and debuted on CBS in August 1976, Ms. Holliday’s character, Florence Jean Castleberry, was a flirtatious redhead — with waves and twists carefully teased and hair-sprayed in place. (It was a wig.) Shamelessly man-crazy — she had been married three times — Flo called most people “sugar,” was much too vain to wear eyeglasses and was happy to explain her own considerable appeal.
As she pointed out to her boss (Vic Tayback) at the fictional roadside Mel’s Diner in Phoenix, “I’m attractive, I’m a good talker, I’m a good dancer, and the list goes on and on.”
Ms. Holliday, a multiple Emmy Award nominee, won the Golden Globe Award for best supporting actress in a television series in 1979 and 1980, matching the two Golden Globes won by Ms. Lavin.
But Flo was only one facet of her career. In 1984, she was in the film “Gremlins,” the small-town horror-comedy that came to be regarded as a Christmas classic. As the wealthy, meanspirited Mrs. Deagle, whom Vincent Canby of The New York Times described as “Kingston Falls’s own wicked witch,” she dies when her stair-lift chair goes haywire (gremlins at work!) and ejects her through an upstairs window into the front-yard snow.
And Ms. Holliday paid several rewarding visits to Broadway. In 1990, she was nominated for a Tony Award for best featured actress for her performance in a revival of Tennessee Williams’s “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.”
In that play, she portrayed a loud, highly strung Mississippi matriarch married to a man (Big Daddy, played by Charles Durning) who hates her. In his Times review, Frank Rich called her character “a poignant Big Mama” and “a rending figure within the thunderstorm of the denouement.”
The stage was always Ms. Holliday’s first love. “An actor is unfortunate if he doesn’t get to spend a lot of time onstage,” she told The Tampa Bay Times in 1992. “When you’re onstage, you get to practice every night.”
Polly Dean Holliday was born on July 2, 1937, in Jasper, Ala., a small town northwest of Birmingham, and grew up in Childersburg, a small town southeast of it. She was the daughter of Ernest Sullivan Holliday, a truck driver, and Velma (Cain) Holliday.
At Childersburg High School, Polly was voted most talented in her senior class. She majored in piano at Alabama College for Women (now the University of Montevallo) but also appeared in a few productions with the school’s theater group. After graduating in 1959, she worked for a while as a music teacher.
At Florida State University, where she enrolled to study music education, she began spending time with drama students and ended up joining the Asolo Repertory Theater in Sarasota in 1962.
She stayed for the better part of a decade, honing her craft in works by Shakespeare, Molière, Chekhov, Shaw, Dickens and the like. One notable role was Madame Defarge in a musical version of “A Tale of Two Cities.”
When she did leave for New York, she began her career on the stage. In 1972, she appeared with Ruby Dee in “Wedding Band,” a drama by Alice Childress about an interracial romance, at the Public Theater.
It became the vehicle for her screen debut, too, when the play was adapted for an ABC television movie in 1974. The Times critic John J. O’Connor found the film “powerful, moving and occasionally very funny.”
Ms. Holliday made her Broadway debut in 1974, playing a highly seducible Southern matron in Murray Schisgal’s comedy “All Over Town,” directed by Dustin Hoffman.
She later did a favor for Mr. Hoffman when he needed guidance in playing an actor pretending to be an actress in the 1982 film “Tootsie.” His female character-within-a-character, Dorothy Michaels, had a silky Southern accent and, like Ms. Holliday’s Flo Castleberry, a frightening temper.
Ms. Holliday returned to Broadway three times. She first co-starred with Jean Stapleton in the comedy “Arsenic and Old Lace” (1986). After “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” she was in a 1994 revival of William Inge’s “Picnic,” playing the heroine’s overly protective mother.
David Richards, writing in The Times, praised her for putting “a revelatory spin” on the character (also named Flo, as it happens), who, she remembers bitterly, was “once the town beauty but wasted every advantage that nature gave her.”
At the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis in 1988, Ms Holliday starred as Amanda Wingfield in Williams’s “The Glass Menagerie.” At the Kimmel Center in Philadelphia in 2002, she was in Tom Stoppard’s “Every Good Boy Deserves Favor.” And at Lincoln Center in 2000, she was in Arthur Laurents’s “The Time of the Cuckoo.”
Off Broadway, Ms. Holliday appeared in “A Quarrel of Sparrows” (1993), a comedy by James Duff; Ben Brantley wrote in The Times that she gave off “a refreshingly touching air of willed, cheerful imperturbability.”
She also appeared in several comedies by John Guare. In “Marco Polo Sings a Solo” (1998), Ms. Holliday’s character revealed that she used to be a man in “one of the play’s silliest and paradoxically most moving monologues, with due attention paid to both effects by the wonderful Polly Holliday,” Charles Isherwood wrote in Variety.
In “Chaucer in Rome” (2001), she was an artist’s embarrassing, touristy mom from Queens. And in Mr. Guare’s “A Few Stout Individuals” (2002), she played the “desperately cheerful wife” of Ulysses S. Grant, as The Star-Ledger of Newark said. The Associated Press called her “fluttery and wonderful.”
But television always beckoned. Ms. Holliday did six episodes of the soap opera “Search for Tomorrow” in 1974 as a character identified only as “prison inmate leader.”
After the better part of four seasons on “Alice” (the show continued without her until 1985), she starred in “Flo,” her own comedy spinoff, in which her character bought a run-down bar in her Texas hometown. The show lasted 29 episodes in the 1980-81 season.
Ms. Holliday appeared in more than a dozen television movies, among them “Bernice Bobs Her Hair” (1976), “You Can’t Take It With You” (1979) and “The Gift of Love: A Christmas Story” (1983). She was in an equal number of series, including “The Golden Girls” (1986), “Amazing Stories” (1986), “The Equalizer” (1988) and “Homicide: Life on the Streets” (1996).
On “The Client” (1995-96), she was the supportive mother and roommate of a recently divorced lawyer (JoBeth Williams). On “Home Improvement,” she was Tim Allen’s slim, sassy mother-in-law, in five different seasons between 1993 and 1999.
And Ms. Holliday was surprisingly versatile in feature films. In “All the President’s Men” (1976), she was a Florida investigator’s very protective secretary; in “Mrs. Doubtfire” (1993), Robin Williams and Sally Field’s annoying next-door neighbor; in “Moon Over Parador,” Jonathan Winters’s excitable wife; and in “The Parent Trap” (1998), a fearless camp director who could handle the toughest discipline problems, even with two Lindsay Lohans.
Her last film appearance was in the 2010 drama “Fair Game” as the concerned mother of the outed C.I.A. operative Valerie Plame.
She left no immediate survivors.
Ms. Holliday felt affection for her “Alice” character, but she often pointed out that the line “Kiss my grits” was hardly an authentic regionalism.
“There was nothing Southern or real about that expression,” she told The Sarasota Herald-Tribune in 2003. “It was pure Hollywood.”
The characterization, however, was heartfelt. “She was a Southern woman you see in a lot of places,” Ms. Holliday said of Flo in the same interview. “Not well educated, but very sharp, with a sense of humor and a resolve not to let life get her down.”
Ash Wu contributed reporting.
The post Polly Holliday, a Sassy Waitress on the Sitcom ‘Alice,’ Dies at 88 appeared first on New York Times.
