05/02/2025
Ruth Buzzi, famed as dowdy purse slinger on ‘Laugh-In,’ dies at 88
Her dour Gladys Ormphby became one of the show’s enduring gags and, for a time, a surprise feminist symbol as a woman who won’t take it anymore.
Ruth Buzzi, a comedic actress with a high-beam smile who often played sidekicks both wisecracking and wise, and who scowled her way to pop-culture fame on the comedy-variety show “Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In” playing a matron who wields her purse like a cudgel, died May 1 at her home near Mingus, Texas. She was 88.
The cause was complications from Alzheimer’s disease, said her husband, Kent Perkins. In 2022, her family announced that she had been disabled from a stroke.
Starting in the late 1960s, Ms. Buzzi found her showbiz niche as a goofball outsider and became a familiar TV face as the lean-on-me friend of star Marlo Thomas in the ABC sitcom “That Girl.”
Ms. Buzzi rarely took a break over the decades: a stint on “Sesame Street,” off-Broadway shows, commercials, cartoon voices and roles in more than 20 films. Many were B-movie blips, but some are part of the Disney catalogue such as “Freaky Friday” (1976) and “The Apple Dumpling Gang Rides Again” (1979). A self-described “Italian Yankee” who grew up in Connecticut, she nonetheless recorded a chart-making country ballad in 1977, “You Oughta Hear the Song,” driven by a desire to take her voice “out of the showers and into the streets.”
One of her early show-business breaks proved to be pivotal to her later success on “Laugh-In.” She landed the part of frumpy Agnes Gooch in a 1960 summer stock production of the comedy “Auntie Mame” in western Pennsylvania. She toyed with various looks until one stuck: wearing a hairnet backward so it “looks like I have a bullet hole in my head,” she recalled.
