Dody Goodman, a comedian and character actress who gained fame as the resident zany on Jack Paar’s late-night show and as the ditsy matriarch on the soap opera send-up “Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman,” has died. She was believed to be 93.
Ms. Goodman died Sunday at Englewood Hospital and Medical Center in New Jersey, said a spokeswoman for the Actors Fund Homes in Englewood, where Ms. Goodman had been living. A cause of death was not announced.
Her early success as a dancer on Broadway gave way to television in the 1950s after friends such as comic actress Imogene Coca persuaded Ms. Goodman that she was naturally funny.
Cultivating a persona in the vein of comedian Gracie Allen was made easier by Ms. Goodman’s distinctive, crackly Southern voice. It has been described as sounding “like a Tweetie Pie cartoon bird strangling on peanut butter” or “gravel mixed into a bowl of honey.” She had a loopy grin to match.
Even Paar wasn’t sure what to make of Ms. Goodman.
“She seemed more like a bird-brained housewife than a ballerina” and “spoke in a distracted manner that defied description,” he said in an excerpt from his 1983 book, “P.S. Jack Paar,” on Ms. Goodman’s Web site. “The more she talked the more obvious it became that no one could have made up Dody Goodman.”
An early guest on the show when it debuted in 1957, Ms. Goodman “had a great deal to do with the original success of the program,” Paar wrote. She was “terribly witty, in a droll way, with a natural sense of the ridiculous.”
Her goofy interactions on the Paar show brought her an Emmy nomination in 1958, but she was off the NBC show the same year after a reported fallout with the host.
She was “a tireless talker,” Paar wrote, and he had begun “to feel like the announcer on ‘The Dody Goodman Show.'”
Ms. Goodman turned to “The Toast of the Town” on CBS with Ed Sullivan and took her quirky act to other TV talk shows. She wouldn’t make it big on television again until “Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman” in 1976.
A cult hit, the late-night show aired five nights a week and was known for its wild but deadpan humor.
In a stage and screen career that spanned more than 65 years, Ms. Goodman portrayed the spaced-out high school secretary in the 1978 film “Grease” and appeared on Broadway in a 1990s revival of the musical.
In addition to guest roles on television shows, she appeared in the 1984 film “Splash,” voiced the part of the baby-sitter on “Alvin and the Chipmunks” animated specials and was a regular on two daytime soaps, “Search for Tomorrow” in the 1960s and “One Life to Live” in the 1980s.
The stage remained a favorite haven, and in the late 1980s, Ms. Goodman joined the national touring company of the musical “Nunsense” as Sister Mary Amnesia, a nun who doesn’t know who she is. Later, she played Mother Superior in the show off-Broadway and appeared in the play as recently as 1999.
“She was the only performer I knew who could walk on stage as Mother Superior and say, ‘Are you ready to start?’ and have the audience in stitches. She didn’t even need a funny line. She was the embodiment of comedy,” Danny Goggin, the creator of “Nunsense,” told Playbill this week.
She was born Dolores Goodman on Oct. 28 in Columbus, Ohio. Her Web site gives 1914 as her birth year, but she was known to obfuscate her age.
Ms. Goodman, who once said she had an early marriage to a dancer, was single and had no immediate survivors.
