Katherine Helmond Overboard (1987)
Katherine Helmond (July 5, 1929 – February 23, 2019) played Edith Mintz, Joanna's mother, in Overboard (1987).
Helmond came to film through Soap and a stack of Tony nominations
Helmond was a Galveston-born stage actress whose Broadway career produced four Tony nominations across two decades — The Great God Brown (1972), The House of Blue Leaves (1971), and others — before television cast her as the dim-but-game Jessica Tate on Susan Harris's groundbreaking nighttime soap-opera parody Soap (1977–81). The Jessica Tate role earned her seven Golden Globe nominations and a win, and made her one of the recognizable adult comedy faces on American television. (wikipedia)
When Overboard shot in spring 1987, Helmond was on hiatus between Soap and the role she would play next: Mona Robinson on Who's the Boss? (1984–92), the wisecracking divorcée mother of Judith Light's Angela. The Edith Mintz role in Overboard sits between the two TV mothers — sharper-edged than Mona, more tightly wound than Jessica — and Helmond plays Edith as the apparatus that produced Joanna.
Edith is the system Joanna escaped, given a face
The Edith scenes are short and load-bearing. The phone call to Grant in which she threatens to "hire a mass of mercenaries to hunt you down and chop off the protruding parts of your body" if he does not produce her daughter (b30) is the moment the Stayton restoration apparatus reaches for Joanna again. The cigarette-pressing scene aboard the Immaculata ("Of course you smoke. You've always smoked," b36) is the apparatus speaking through Edith's mouth — "you have always" doing the structural work of "you must continue to." The horror at the kitchen-tray retrieval ("she became a waitress!", b37) is the apparatus discovering that Joanna has come back wrong.
Helmond plays all of this without softening it and without playing it for villainy. Edith genuinely believes she is rescuing her daughter from something she escaped into. The film's thesis line — Andrew's "rare privilege of escaping your bonds" speech at b38 — is delivered to Joanna immediately after Edith has gone to bed, because the speech is the answer Edith does not know how to give and Joanna does not know how to ask for.
Helmond worked with Terry Gilliam twice and Pixar once
In parallel to the sitcom career, Helmond built an unlikely auteur thread. Terry Gilliam cast her twice — as the obsessive plastic-surgery-addicted Mrs. Lowry in Brazil (1985) and again in Time Bandits (1981) — and the Brazil role in particular gave her a place in the Criterion canon that her sitcom work would not have produced. Pixar cast her as the voice of Lizzie, the Model T retired in Radiator Springs, in Cars (2006), Cars 2 (2011), and Cars 3 (2017) — Helmond's last screen credit.
"Terry Gilliam called me in for Brazil and said, 'Would you mind being grotesque?' And I said, 'I would love to be grotesque.'" — Katherine Helmond, Television Academy Foundation (1999)
Helmond also directed several episodes of Who's the Boss?, Coach, and Benson, becoming one of the early generation of female TV directors who came up through their own series.
She died of complications from Alzheimer's disease in February 2019 at age eighty-nine.
Selected filmography
| Year | Film/TV | Role | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1977–81 | Soap | Jessica Tate | Seven Golden Globe nominations |
| 1981 | Time Bandits | Mrs. Ogre | Gilliam |
| 1985 | Brazil | Mrs. Ida Lowry | Gilliam |
| 1987 | Overboard | Edith Mintz | |
| 1984–92 | Who's the Boss? | Mona Robinson | Eight seasons |
| 1991 | Lady Boss (TV) | — | |
| 2001–07 | Everybody Loves Raymond | Lois Whelan | Recurring |
| 2006 | Cars | Lizzie (voice) | First of three |
| 2017 | Cars 3 | Lizzie (voice) | Last role |