Patty Maloney, ‘Far Out Space Nuts’ and ‘Star Wars Holiday Special’ Actress, Dies at 89

Patty Maloney, the 3-foot-11 actress who played the alien Honk on the Sid & Marty Krofft family show Far Out Space Nuts and Chewbacca’s son, Lumpy, on the long-lamented Star Wars Holiday Special, has died. She was 89.

Maloney had suffered several strokes over the years and died Monday in hospice care in Winter Park, Florida, her brother, Dave Myrabo, told The Hollywood Reporter. “For a little person growing up in a big world, she did everything she wanted to do,” he said.

Maloney did lots of work alongside the 3-foot-10 Billy Barty. The two appeared together in the Wizard of Oz feature Under the Rainbow (1981), starring Chevy Chase, and on episodes of Little House on the Prairie, Charlie’s Angels, The Love Boat, Trapper John, M.D. and more.

Far Out Space Nuts, starring Bob Denver and Chuck McCann as bumbling maintenance workers turned accidental space travelers, aired for one season (1975-76) on CBS. Maloney’s furry Honk couldn’t speak but communicated through a horn on the top of its head.

“Her extensive dancing and mime skills enabled her to convey a full range of emotions for Honk without ever speaking a word of dialogue — and with her facial features utterly obscured,” an impressed Hal Erickson noted in his 2007 book, Sid and Marty Krofft: A Critical Study of Saturday Morning Children’s Television 1969-1993.

Few were impressed with anything or anyone having to do with The Star Wars Holiday Special, which aired the week before Thanksgiving in 1978 on CBS and featured Star Wars actors alongside the likes of Bea Arthur, Art Carney and Harvey Korman.

A few years after it ran, George Lucas reportedly said, “If I had the time and a sledgehammer, I would track down every bootlegged copy of the program and smash it.”

Maloney was central to the family-friendly plot as the son of Chewbacca, played by Peter Mayhew, who had originated the role in the first Star Wars film. (The special also introduced Chewbacca’s father and wife.)

Her Lumpy costume “was made of all human hair, which made it very, very warm,” she recalled in a 2008 interview. “I remember I was doing something on The Towering Inferno, doing a stunt on that, and I had to go over after shooting all day to Stan Winston’s for the face, because he did the head — he did the make-up and the electronics in the head.”

Patricia Ann Maloney was born on March 17, 1936, in Perkinsville, New York. After her father died when she was 7, she was raised in Winter Park by her mother, Kay, and her stepfather, Jerry, an accountant.

Maloney performed with a carnival and with the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus and attended the University of Florida.

In 1961, she married Joseph Vitek, a printer from Chicago, but after his death from melanoma in 1968, she was urged by friends to return to performing as a way to overcome her grief.

She served as a puppeteer in Fol-de-Pol, a 1972 filmed version of a live Krofft brothers puppet show set at a medieval fair. Barty also worked in that, and in 1976, the two were cast in a pilot for a CBS sitcom called Don’t Call Us that starred Jack Gilford and Marty King as owners of a talent agency.

She and Barty also were regulars on a 1978-79 NBC variety show hosted by The Bay City Rollers — the Kroffts produced that — before teaming again on a 1982 CBS special headlined by Cheryl Ladd.

She also appeared for the Kroffts on Brady Bunch and Donny & Marie variety shows.

Maloney’s résumé included the films The Ice Pirates (1984), Swing Shift (1984) and Ernest Saves Christmas (1988) and the series Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman; Rhoda; Buck Rogers in the 25th Century; Married … With Children; Star Trek: Voyager; Nash Bridges; and My Name Is Earl.

She also did voice work and operated the Crypt Keeper puppet on HBO’s Tales From the Crypt.

In addition to her brother, survivors include her nieces, Jennifer and Laura, and her brother-in-law, Vic.