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Dody Goodman, R.I.P.
I always thought she was hilarious!
June 24, 2008
Dody Goodman, 93, Television Actress, Dies
By DOUGLAS MARTIN
Dody Goodman, an actress who combined a dancer’s grace, a strawberry blond mane and exquisitely timed scatter-brained humor to create television legends, first as a fey foil to Jack Paar and later on the soap-opera parody “Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman,” died Sunday in Englewood, N. J. She was 93, older than she often said.
Victor Goldsmith, a receptionist at the Actors Fund Home in Englewood, confirmed the death and age.
Ms. Goodman’s distinctive voice was once described as sounding “like a Tweetie Pie cartoon bird strangling on peanut butter.” Her sweet face, Kewpie-doll mouth, supple tongue and teasing way of pausing before speaking were familiar to two generations.
“I just opened my mouth and people laughed,” she said in an interview with The New York Times in 1983.
Miss Goodman was a show-business ingénue when Mr. Paar invited her to be on his second episode of “The Tonight Show,” on July 30, 1957, and she became a regular. He wrote in his memoir that her “wackily endearing quality” made her his “first big hit.”
But she was hardly deferential. When Mr. Paar once remarked, “Give them enough rope,” she blithely replied, “And they’ll skip.”
Mr. Paar dropped her from the show in 1958. He wrote that he felt “like the announcer on ‘The Dody Goodman Show.’ ”
On “Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman,” a cutting satire of TV mores in 1976-77 that retains a cult following, Miss Goodman played the title character’s mother. She talked to plants and had an affair with a hot-air balloonist who crashed through her kitchen roof. Her crackly voice intoned the show’s title during opening credits.
Dolores Goodman, who left no immediate survivors, was born in Columbus on Oct. 28, 1914. She came to New York and danced in the ballet company of Radio City Music Hall and on Broadway. Imogene Coca, with whom she had acted, steered her to comedy and she was soon doing televised humor sketches.
Her subsequent career included appearing on the television show “Diff’rent Strokes”; in the movies “Grease” and “Splash”; as the cartoon voiceover in “The Chipmunk Adventure”; and in a wide range of live dramas.
Miss Goodman appeared in several roles in “Nunsense,” an off-Broadway musical farce, which opened in 1985, and in its sequels. The show’s creator, Danny Goggin, said in an interview with Playbill magazine that at 85 she could still lift her leg over her head as the Sugar Plum Fairy in “Nuncrackers.”
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