Ruth Buzzi, famous for her work as handbag-wielding spinster Gladys Ormphby on “Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In,” died Thursday, her family announced Friday. The Emmy-nominated actor was 88.

“Ruth Buzzi died peacefully in her sleep at home in Texas,” “She was in hospice care for several years with Alzheimer’s disease.”
Buzzi’s husband of more than 40 years, Kent Perkins, announced in July 2022 that she had suffered “devastating strokes” that left her bedridden and incapacitated.

“I am living with an attitude of gratitude for 43 years of marriage to my best friend, the greatest person I ever met, the one and only Ruth Buzzi,” he wrote at the time on social media. “Her love for others knows no bounds, and she has spent a lifetime making people smile.”

She could still speak, understand and recognize her friends and loved ones at that point, he said..Early Thursday morning he wrote on Facebook that Buzzi had “asked me to thank all of you for being so good to her for so many years. She wants you to know she probably had more fun doing those shows than you had watching them.”

The performer was born July 24, 1936, in Rhode Island and raised in Connecticut. She enrolled at 17 at the Pasadena Playhouse College of Theatre Arts, which was affiliated with Southern California’s Pasadena Playhouse from 1928 to 1969. She also spent six years working in New York, where she was cast in no fewer than 18 revues.

“I was just very very comfortable in that form and I still am and I love it,” Buzzi said in an archival interview posted last year on the “Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In” YouTube page.

She was in every episode of NBC’s “Laugh-In” (1967-73), where she honed her comedic role as a park-bench spinster and was among many cast members to utter the line “Sock it to me.” Buzzi was already a fixture on television in the late 1960s with appearances on “The Monkees” (1967) and “The Steve Allen Comedy Hour” (1967) and a part on “That Girl” (1967-68).

In sketches where Buzzi played Gladys, she would typically be sitting on a bench and actor Arte Johnson — who died in 2019 — would sidle up in the character of a little old man and proceed to invade her space. Then he would mutter lines that could be taken in more than one way — and Gladys would always take them the wrong way. Whacks with the purse would ensue. Other actors might be caught in the handbag crosshairs as well if it meant an additional punch line could land.

REST IN PEACE MS. BUZZI