Anne Ramsey

Anne Ramsey (March 27, 1929 – August 11, 1988) was an American actress born in Omaha, Nebraska, who built a career spanning Broadway, television, and film. Her father, Nathan Mobley, worked as an insurance executive, and her mother, Eleanor, served as the former national treasurer of the Girl Scouts of the USA and was a descendant of Pilgrim William Brewster. Her uncle was U.S. Ambassador David S. Smith. Ramsey grew up in Great Neck, New York and Greenwich, Connecticut, where she attended Rosemary Hall before enrolling at Bennington College, an experience that sparked her interest in theatre.

Ramsey performed in Broadway productions during the 1950s, including an appearance in Sweet Bird of Youth in 1959. That same year, she and her husband, actor Logan Ramsey, whom she had married in 1954, relocated to Philadelphia and established the Theatre of the Living Arts. Her Broadway work placed her among the performers active in New York theatre during that decade.

Beginning in the 1970s, Ramsey pursued a Hollywood career focused on character roles, appearing in television programs including Little House on the Prairie, Wonder Woman, Three's Company, and Ironside. She and Logan Ramsey appeared together in seven films, starting with The Sporting Club in 1971.

Her most prominent screen work came in the 1980s. She played Mama Fratelli in The Goonies (1985), a role that earned her a Saturn Award for Best Supporting Actress. Her performance as Mrs. Lift in Throw Momma from the Train (1987), alongside Billy Crystal and Danny DeVito, brought her a second Saturn Award for Best Supporting Actress, as well as nominations for both the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress and the Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actress in a Motion Picture. In February 1988, she guest-starred on an episode of ALF, and she appeared in a cameo role in Scrooged shortly before her death. Six additional films in which she had appeared were released in the two years following her death, including Meet the Hollowheads (1989), her final screen credit with her husband.

The distinctive quality of Ramsey's speech in her later performances resulted from surgery in 1984 to treat esophageal cancer, during which portions of her tongue and jaw were removed. Her cancer returned in 1988, and she died on August 11 of that year at the Motion Picture and Television Country House and Hospital in Woodland Hills, California, at the age of 59. She is buried at Forest Lawn Cemetery in North Omaha, Nebraska.