Ruth Buzzi

Ruth Ann Buzzi, born July 24, 1936, in Westerly, Rhode Island, was an American actress, singer, and comedian who worked across stage, film, and television throughout a career spanning decades. She died on May 1, 2025. Her father, Angelo Peter Buzzi, was a nationally recognized stone sculptor who had immigrated from Arzo, Switzerland, in 1923 and established Buzzi Memorials, a business later operated by her older brother Harold until his retirement in 2013. Buzzi grew up in the village of Wequetequock in Stonington, Connecticut, in a stone house overlooking Wequetequock Cove, and attended Stonington High School, where she served as head cheerleader.

At eighteen, Buzzi relocated to California to study at the Pasadena Playhouse College of Theatre Arts, where her classmates included Dustin Hoffman and Gene Hackman. She graduated with honors in June 1957, though she had already begun working professionally before completing her degree. At nineteen, she traveled with singer Rudy Vallée in a live musical and comedy act during a summer break, an engagement that earned her an Actors' Equity Association union card. After graduation she moved to New York City, where she was hired immediately for a lead role in an off-Broadway musical revue, the first of nineteen such productions in which she performed along the East Coast. During this period she worked alongside Barbra Streisand, Joan Rivers, Dom DeLuise, and Carol Burnett, all early in their respective careers. She also appeared in New York musical variety shows and made numerous television commercials, some of which received national recognition including the Clio Award.

Buzzi's first significant national television exposure came in 1964 on The Garry Moore Show, where she played Shakundala the Silent, a bumbling magician's assistant opposite Dom DeLuise's character Dominic the Great. That same year she became a member of the regular repertory company on the CBS variety program The Entertainers, which ran through 1965. In 1966, she appeared on Broadway in Sweet Charity, the original production starring Gwen Verdon, playing three small roles: the Good Fairy, Woman with Hat, and Receptionist.

In 1967, Buzzi appeared in all eight episodes of The Steve Allen Comedy Hour, and the character work she performed in those sketches led directly to her casting on NBC's Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In. She was the only featured player to appear in every episode of the series, including its pilot and a standalone television special, and remained with the show from 1968 to 1973. Her recurring characters included Flicker Farkle of the Farkle family, the Hollywood gossip columnist Busy-Buzzi, cocktail-lounge regular Doris Swizzler, and one of the Burbank Airlines Stewardesses. Her most recognized character was Gladys Ormphby, a drab, bun-wearing spinster who wielded her purse as a weapon and was frequently subjected to the unwanted advances of Arte Johnson's character Tyrone F. Horneigh. Buzzi had first developed the Gladys look while playing Agnes Gooch in a summer stock production of Auntie Mame. NBC later adapted the Ormphby and Horneigh characters into animation as The Nitwits, part of the mid-1970s series Baggy Pants and the Nitwits, with both Buzzi and Johnson voicing their respective roles. For her work on Laugh-In, Buzzi won a Golden Globe Award and received five Emmy nominations.

As Gladys, Buzzi also appeared in numerous NBC Dean Martin Celebrity Roasts held at the MGM Grand Hotel in Las Vegas, where the character attacked roastees including Muhammad Ali, Frank Sinatra, and Lucille Ball with her purse, and similarly struck Martin himself when he made disparaging remarks about Gladys's appearance. Separately, Dean Martin's producer Greg Garrison hired Buzzi for comedy specials starring Dom DeLuise. She was also featured in the second season of That Girl as Marlo Thomas's friend Margie Peterson, and in 1975 she co-starred with Jim Nabors in The Lost Saucer, a Sid and Marty Krofft production in which they played time-traveling androids; the series ran for sixteen episodes through September 1976. In 1979 she appeared in two episodes of the Canadian children's comedy series You Can't Do That on Television, as well as the full run of its spinoff Whatever Turns You On. In 1977, she released the single You Oughta Hear the Song, which reached number ninety on Billboard's national Country Music chart.

Buzzi accumulated an extensive list of television guest appearances, including roles on Alice, The Carol Burnett Show, The Flip Wilson Show, The Dean Martin Music and Comedy Hour, Tony Orlando and Dawn, The Monkees, Emergency, The Muppet Show, Saved by the Bell, and variety series hosted by Leslie Uggams and Glen Campbell, among many others. She appeared eight times on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson and served as a celebrity judge on The Gong Show. She played Mrs. Wilcox in an episode of Lucille Ball's final comedy series, Life with Lucy, and portrayed the eccentric Nurse Kravitz on the NBC daytime soap opera Passions. In 2006 and 2007 she made guest appearances on the children's series Come on Over.

In 1993, Buzzi joined the cast of Sesame Street as Ruthie, a shopkeeper who ran Finders Keepers as part of the show's Around the Corner set expansion. After that set was removed in 1999, she continued to appear on the program in insert segments, frequently in costume as other characters. She also voiced Suzie Kabloozie and her cat Feff in animated inserts broadcast on Sesame Street from 1994 to 2008, and reprised the role of Ruthie in several Sesame Street specials and productions including Sesame Street Stays Up Late, Sesame Street's All Star 25th Birthday: Stars and Street Forever, Elmopalooza, The Best of Elmo, and the feature film The Adventures of Elmo in Grouchland. Her voice work extended to numerous animated series, including the role of Nose Marie in the Hanna-Barbera series Pound Puppies beginning in 1986, Mama Bear in Berenstain Bears in 1985, and guest voices on The Smurfs, The Angry Beavers, and Mo Willems' Sheep in the Big City. She appeared in the music video Gump by Weird Al Yankovic and in videos with the B-52's and the Presidents of the United States of America. Buzzi had featured roles in more than twenty films, among them Freaky Friday, The North Avenue Irregulars, The Apple Dumpling Gang Rides Again, The Villain, Chu Chu and the Philly Flash, Surf II, and The Adventures of Elmo in Grouchland.