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.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.”
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.”
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.”
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.
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.”
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