Polly Holliday, a Tony Award-nominated screen and stage actor who turned the catchphrase “Kiss my grits!”into a national retort as the gum-chewing, beehive-wearing waitress aboard the long-running CBS sitcom Alice, has died. She was 88.
Holliday died Tuesday at her home in New York, said her theatrical agent, Dennis Aspland. She was the last surviving member of the principal cast of Alice; Linda Lavin, who played the title character, died last year.
Alice ran from 1976 to 1985, a more comedic take on Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, the Martin Scorsese-directed 1974 film that won Ellen Burstyn an Oscar for playing the title waitress. Holliday had turned into such a star that the network gave her her own short-lived spin-off called Flo in 1980, but it lasted just 29 episodes.
Holliday earned four Golden Globe nominations and won one in 1980 for Alice, as well as four Emmy Award nominations — three for Alice and one for Flo.
As for the “Kiss my grits!” line, the Alabama-born Holliday was quick to distance herself from it, telling interviewers that the line was pure Hollywood and not a regional saying. But she identified with Flo.
“She was a Southern woman you see in a lot of places,” she told The Sarasota Herald-Tribune in 2003. Not well educated, but very sharp, with a sense of humour and a resolve not to let life get her down.
Holliday’s career included stints on Broadway — including a Tony nod opposite Kathleen Turner in a 1990 revival of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof — and lots of TV, including playing the blind sister to Betty White’s character in Golden Girls. On the big screen, her credits included John Grisham 1995 legal thriller series The Client and portraying a protective secretary in All the President’s Men.
Her Broadway credits include All Over Town in 1974 directed by Dustin Hoffman, Arsenic and Old Lace in 1986 with Jean Stapleton and Abe Vigoda, and a revival of Picnic with Kyle Chandler in 1994.
Some of her more memorable credits include the wicked Mrs. Deagle in Gremlins, Tim Allen’s sassy mother-in-law on Home Improvement and off-Broadway in A Quarrel of Sparrows, in which The New York Times said she radiated a refreshingly touching air of willed, cheerful imperturbability.
