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Polly Holliday, theater star famous as
the tart waitress Flo on sitcom 'Alice,' dies at 88
[September 11, 2025]
By MARK KENNEDY
NEW YORK
(AP) — Polly Holliday, a Tony Award-nominated screen and stage actor who
turned the catchphrase “Kiss my grits!” into a national retort as the
gum-chewing, beehive-wearing waitress aboard the long-running CBS sitcom
“Alice,” has died. She was 88.
Holliday died Tuesday at her home in New York, said her theatrical
agent, Dennis Aspland. She was the last surviving member of the
principal cast of “Alice;” Linda Lavin, who played the title character,
died last year.
“Alice” ran
from 1976 to 1985, but Holliday had turned into such a star that the
network gave her her own short-lived spin-off called “Flo” in 1980. It
lasted a year. |
Actor Polly Holliday appears outside the 46th Street Theater in New York
on July 15, 1986. (AP Photo/Waring Abbott, File) |
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Holliday earned four Golden Globe nominations and won one in
1980 for “Alice,” as well as four Emmy Award nominations, three
for “Alice” and one for “Flo.”
As for the “Kiss my grits!” line, the Alabama-born Holliday was
quick to distance herself from it, telling interviewers that the
line was “pure Hollywood” and not a regional saying. But she
identified with Flo.
"She was a Southern woman you see in a lot of places,” she told
The Sarasota Herald-Tribune in 2003. “Not well educated, but
very sharp, with a sense of humor and a resolve not to let life
get her down.”
Holliday's career included stints on Broadway — including a Tony
nod opposite Kathleen Turner in a 1990 revival of “Cat on a Hot
Tin Roof” — and lots of TV, including playing the blind sister
to Betty White's character in “Golden Girls.” On the big screen,
her credits included John Grisham 1995 legal thriller series
“The Client” and portraying a protective secretary in “All the
President’s Men.”
Her Broadway credits include “All Over Town” in 1974 directed by
Dustin Hoffman, “Arsenic and Old Lace” in 1986 with Jean
Stapleton and Abe Vigoda, and a revival of “Picnic” with Kyle
Chandler in 1994.
Some of her more memorable credits include the wicked Mrs.
Deagle in “Gremlins,” Tim Allen’s sassy mother-in-law on “Home
Improvement” and off-Broadway in “A Quarrel of Sparrows,” in
which The New York Times said she radiated "a refreshingly
touching air of willed, cheerful imperturbability.”
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