Ruth Buzzi, famous for her work as a single that pushes bags, Gladys Ormphby in “Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In,” died Thursday, his family announced Friday. The actor nominated for Emmy was 88 years old.
“Ruth Buzzi died peacefully as she slept at home in Texas,” reads the note on Facebook. “She was in hospice care for several years with Alzheimer's disease.”
Buzzi's husband, over 40, Kent Perkins, announced in July 2022 that he had suffered “devastating blows” that left her in bed and incapacitated.
“I am living with an attitude of gratitude for 43 years of marriage to my best friend, the best person I have met, the only and unique Ruth Buzzi,” he wrote at that time on social networks. “His love for others knows limits, and a lifetime has spent smiling people.”
He could still speak, understand and recognize his friends and loved ones at that time, he said.
The morning of Thursday he wrote on Facebook that Buzzi “asked me to thank everyone for being so good with her for so many years. He wants you to know that he probably had more fun doing those programs than they had seeing them.”
The artist was born on July 24, 1936 at Rhode Island and grew up in Connecticut. He registered at age 17 at the Pasadena Playhouse College of Theater Arts, who was affiliated with Pasadena Playhouse from southern California from 1928 to 1969. He also spent six years working in New York, where she was chosen in no less than 18 revisions.
“I was very comfortable in that way and I'm still and I love it,” Buzzi said in a file interview published last year on the YouTube page “Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In.”
He was in each episode of “Laugh-In” of NBC (1967-73), where he perfected his comic role as a bachelor of Park Bancos, and was among many cast members to pronounce the line “Socse it to me”. Buzzi was already a fixed element on television in the late 1960s with appearances in “The Monkees” (1967) and “The Steve Allen Comedy Hour” (1967) and a part of “That Girl” (1967-68).
In sketches where Buzzi played Gladys, he would usually be sitting in a bank and actor Art Johnson, who died in 2019, would approach the character of a small old man and proceed to invade his space. Then he murmured lines that could be taken in more than one form, and Gladys would do it always Take them in the wrong way. The blows would occur with the bag. Other actors could also be trapped in the sight of the bag bag if that meant that an additional drilling line could land.
“You can't find anyone more fun than Goldie Hawn or Ruth Buzzi or Johnson Art,” he told the “Laugh-In” executive producer, George Schlatter, The Times in 2019.
Buzzi said in the YouTube interview that he met Schlatter for the first time after she was recommended by the role by an agent who had previously fired when she was in New York.
He was in New York City working on his first and only Broadway show, he said, playing the parts of “Woman with hat” and “receptionist” in the original production of “Sweet Charity” starring Gwen Verdon and directed by Bob Fosse that premiered in the early 1966.
“I thought I had reached the top. I was very happy on that program and on a Friday night before entering the program I received a call from the Steve Allen town, which was here in California, and they were about to start a show that was going to replace” the Smothers brothers “and it was called” the time of Steve Allen comedy “and they were looking for someone to be opposite [Allen’s wife] Jayne Meadows.
“This was a Friday night and they wanted him to be there next Monday morning. So I had to go to Bob Fosse and Gwen Verdon and say: 'Hey, this is what is happening, do you think I should go?' And they said: 'Do you think you should go?
She said she did not go until Fosse and Verdon had promised him that he could return to “Sweet Charity” when he ended in California.
In the individual hearing with Schlatter that followed, he got excited about the characters she presented her from her time doing 18 review shows for six years in New York. Buzzi said he felt it was a “good adjustment” for “Laugh-in” because he was very familiar with the Revue style format.
“Laugh-In” made a special in 1967 and then debuted in 1968, trying with “The Smothers Brothers” to be relevant to changing times. “Seen from today, it looks a little behind its time, a version of the person of the 1950s of the 1960s: Gokini-Go-Go dance, hippie jokes, jokes about Raquel Welch's breasts, even when the dream dream of love had given way to a year of violence and bad vibes,” wrote television critic Robert Lloyd in Times in 2018.
Schlatter probably did not agree, as he explained to the Times in 2017 that there had been no rules in the program. “It was a utopian television moment. It was a collection of a huge group of people who were very talented, dedicated and outrageous at a time when the outrage was fashionable.”
Buzzi ended up nominated for three Emmy awards during stellar schedule, all for his work in “Laugh-In”, and won a golden balloon from the cast actress for the show in 1973. She was nominated for two emmys during the day, for the appearances of “Sesame Street” in 1987 and 1994 characters.
Among their most recent action credits were the 2009 film “City of Supring and Nosse”, “Fallen Angels” (2006) and multiple episodes of the television television television “Passions” (2003). His final credit came in 2021, when he played Agnes in the movie “One Mont Out”.
“Ruth Buzzi brought a unique energy and charm to outline the comedy that made her stand out in 'Laugh-in' and 'Dean Martin Celebrity Roast',” said the executive director of the National Comedy Comedy on Friday, Guinderson, in a statement. “His characters, especially the unforgettable Gladys Ormphby, captured the lovely absurd of the time. We remember her with admiration and appreciation for the joy and laughter that brought generations of fans.”
Buzzi had stories about “laugh”, including telling the Times in 2011 about working with John Wayne in a sketch where Gladys was not a single.
“John Wayne loved us so much. I would do almost anything to ask him to do. He made a sketch where he was Gladys's husband,” he said. “They made me wear a small cowboy hat and small guns. I had to hit him and continued hitting him waiting for them to say cuts. I turned around and said: 'Please, I don't want to hit this man.' It was so funny to put [the aside] in the program “.
Nancy Sinatra recalled “Laugh-in” on Friday, tweeting that Buzzi “was a comic genius” and that “working with her in laughter was the most fun I have ever worked. I pressed her friendship and I am disconsolate from waking up with the news that she has left. I love you, Ruthie. My God, old friend.”
The former Times staff writer, Lauren Beale, contributed to this report.
