Judy Carne

Judy Carne, born Joyce Audrey Botterill on 27 April 1939 in Northampton, England, was an actress who built a career across British and American television, film, and Broadway before her death on 3 September 2015 in Northampton. Her parents, Harold and Kathy, operated a greengrocer's shop in Kingsthorpe. She trained at the Pitt-Draffen Academy of Dance and subsequently enrolled at the Bush-Davis Theatrical School for Girls in East Grinstead, West Sussex. An instructor there advised her to abandon the name Joyce for professional purposes, and she adopted Judy as her first name. The surname Carne derived from a character named Sarat Carn in the play Bonaventure, written by English playwright Charlotte Hastings.

Her earliest television work appeared in Britain in 1961, with roles on the series Danger Man and the BBC sitcom The Rag Trade. She relocated to the United States shortly afterward, securing her first regular American television role in the sitcom Fair Exchange in 1963, playing an English teenager living with an American family while an American girl resided with her family in England. Additional American television work followed, including The Baileys of Balboa in 1964, Love on a Rooftop in 1966 alongside Pete Duel, and multiple appearances on The Man from U.N.C.L.E. She also guest-starred on Gidget in 1965, 12 O'Clock High in 1965, Bonanza in 1963 as Sister Mary Kathleen, The Big Valley in 1967, and appeared as herself on both I Dream of Jeannie and Gunsmoke in 1966. Her film credits during this period included A Pair of Briefs in 1962 and The Americanization of Emily in 1964.

Carne achieved widespread recognition through Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In, on which she appeared from 1968 to 1970. Her signature routine concluded with the catchphrase "Sock it to me," followed by her being doused with water or subjected to some other physical gag. She was a series regular throughout the first two seasons, covering 1968 and 1969, and later described the show as having become "a big, bloody bore," after which she made only occasional guest appearances during the 1969–1970 season. A cast recording on the Epic Records label was released in 1968, and her own single "Sock It To Me," backed with "Right Said Fred," was released on the Reprise label in April of that year.

Her Broadway career centered on the 1970 revival of the musical The Boy Friend, in which she starred. The production opened on 14 April 1970 and ran for 111 performances. Later television credits included a guest role in episode eleven of the first season of Alias Smith and Jones in 1971, the NBC children's special Super Plastic Elastic Goggles the same year, the television adaptation of QB VII in 1974, and a Laugh-In Christmas television special in 1993, the same year she attended the program's twenty-fifth anniversary. Her film work continued with All the Right Noises in 1971 and Rachel Amodeo's What About Me in 1993, in which she appeared opposite Richard Hell and Johnny Thunders.

Carne was married twice. Her first marriage, to actor Burt Reynolds, lasted from 1963 to 1965. Her second, to producer Robert Bergmann, began on 3 May 1970 and ended in 1971. Both marriages were childless and concluded in divorce. In 1985 she published an autobiography, Laughing on the Outside, Crying on the Inside: The Bittersweet Saga of the Sock-It-To-Me Girl, which addressed her bisexuality, her marriage to and divorce from Reynolds, and her experiences with drugs. Reynolds attempted without success to prevent the book's publication. In 1978 she and her second husband were involved in a car accident in which her neck was broken, though she recovered. She faced multiple drug-related legal difficulties, including a 1986 arrest at London's Heathrow Airport that resulted in a conviction for drug possession and a two-month term served at HM Prison Cookham Wood out of a three-month sentence. Carne returned to Northamptonshire in the 1980s and lived in the village of Pitsford until her death from pneumonia at a Northampton hospital on 3 September 2015.