Original Sweet Charity cast member Ruth Buzzi died May 1, due to complications from Alzheimer's disease. She was 88.
Ms. Buzzi's stage career was brief, but impactful. Working musical and comedy revues from the age of 19, she worked the regional, touring, and Off-Broadway circuits throughout the early 1960s, working alongside other young performers who would go on to significant prominence, including Rudy Vallee, Barbra Streisand, Joan Rivers, Dom DeLuise, Bernadette Peters, and Carol Burnett. She supplemented the meager income she received from variety show appearances with television commercials, winning a number of Clio Awards for her work as a television saleswoman.
Her first big break came in 1964, when Burnett brought her on The Garry Moore Show to portray Shakundala the Silent, a bumbling magician's assistant for DeLuise's character Dominic the Great. This led to Ms. Buzzi becoming a member of the regular repertory company on the CBS variety show The Entertainers, a job she left in 1965 to appear in the original Broadway production of Sweet Charity. Buzzy played handful of small ensemble roles, most notably in the musical's original final scene. After Charity has been again pushed in the lake by a lover, she emerges to find Buzzi as a magical fairy, calling out about the wonderful future Charity can expect beginning tonight. Then she turns around, revealing that she's part of a guerilla marketing campaign for a new network TV show, The Good Fairy. This quirky ending was replaced in most of the musical's subsequent Broadway stagings.
Following Sweet Charity, Ms. Buzzi would wholly throw her lot in with television, starring in Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In. While she played dozens of characters on the program, her most famous was the spinster Gladys Ormphby, an evolution of the costume and physicality she had devised while playing Agnes Gooch in a school production of Auntie Mame. Ms. Buzzi was the only player to appear in every episode of Laugh-In including the pilot for the show and the Laugh-In television special.
Ms. Buzzi appeared on countless television shows, in more than 20 films, and so many celebrity roasts that she became a fixture of the Las Vegas comedy scene in the late 20th century. Armed with her wit and her diabolical ability to aim her purse as a weapon, she was one of the few comedians of her era to entertain across gender, class, and generational lines, from raunchy roasts with Dean Martin to numerous appearances on Sesame Street. Over her career, she received a Golden Globe and 5 Emmy nominations.
She is survived by her husband of 47 years, Kent Perkins. Donations in her memory can be made to the .
