Katherine Helmond made eccentric women seem quite at home with themselves. We rate the precise comedy of her sitcom matriarchs and her work with Terry Gilliam, while wishing the familiar casting as an odd mother had left her more to do.
Fi1m perspective
In Brazil (1985), Katherine Helmond's Mrs. Ida Lowry is a mother obsessed with plastic surgery. Helmond plays Ida as quite certain that her vanity needs no explaining. We found the obsession funny and uncomfortable because she makes such extreme behaviour seem ordinary. Her childlike quality is useful here: it gives the grotesque character a conviction that a more knowing performance might have lost. She fits Terry Gilliam's elaborate absurdities without disappearing into them.
Soap (1977–1981) gave her the breakthrough role of Jessica Tate; Who's the Boss? (1984–1992) followed with Mona Robinson, a liberated grandmother. These sitcoms gave her sustained work as a comic matriarch, with room for the precise timing she brought from the stage. She was often cast as ditzy or bawdy women, but eccentricity alone is not what we value. There is care in the way she plays flightiness, and the childlike quality stops foolishness from becoming merely tiresome.
Gilliam found a stranger use for those qualities, beginning with Mrs. Ogre in Time Bandits (1981), the first of their three collaborations. His exaggerated supporting parts gave Helmond opportunities for grotesquerie and physical transformation beyond the sitcom mother. Brazil makes particularly good use of that possibility, setting Ida's vanity within a bureaucratic nightmare whose detail makes its cruelty difficult to dismiss. The film's storytelling loses shape, and we would not pretend a well-played supporting character can repair that. Helmond does, however, give us a recognisable human obsession amid the elaborate machinery.
The reservation about her work is how often she was asked to be another eccentric mother. Familiar casting can mean we know what sort of joke is coming before the character speaks. We enjoy the comic assurance, but would have welcomed more opportunities to see what else she might do. We would start with Brazil; allow for some untidy storytelling.
Biography
Katherine Helmond was an American actress and director. Born in Galveston, Texas, she began her career in theatre, working in New York during the 1950s and 1960s, and received a Tony Award nomination for her Broadway performance in The Great God Brown (1973).
She became best known for her television roles as Jessica Tate in the sitcom Soap (1977–1981) and as Mona Robinson in Who's the Boss? (1984–1992). Other notable television work included recurring appearances as Lois Whelan in Everybody Loves Raymond (1996–2004) and Doris Sherman in Coach (1995–1997). She also voiced Lizzie in the Cars film trilogy (2006–2017).
In film, Helmond appeared in Family Plot (1976), Time Bandits (1981), Brazil (1985) as Mrs. Ida Lowry, Overboard (1987) and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998). She directed several television episodes and died in Los Angeles in 2019.
