Polly Holliday, Flo, the “Kiss My Grits” Waitress on ‘Alice,’ Dies at 88

Polly Holliday, the Alabama-born actress who told folks to “Kiss my grits!” as the spirited waitress Flo on the CBS sitcom Alice and her own spinoff, has died. She was 88. 

Holliday died Tuesday at her home in Manhattan, Dennis Aspland, her theatrical agent and friend, told The New York Times.

In 1990, Holliday received a Tony nomination for playing Big Mama in a revival of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Four years earlier, she starred opposite Jean Stapleton on Broadway in another revival of a classic, Arsenic and Old Lace.

On the big screen, Holliday played Ruby Deagle, the wealthy and wicked widow who meets her swift end after a ride on a tampered stair-lift chair in Joe Dante’s Gremlins (1984).

She also appeared in John G. Avildsen’s W.W. and the Dixie Dancekings (1975), Paul Mazursky‘s Moon Over Parador (1988), Chris Columbus’ Mrs. Doubtfire (1993), Mr. Wrong (1996) — as Ellen DeGeneres’ mom — Nancy Meyers’ The Parent Trap (1998) and the Farrelly brothers’ remake of The Heartbreak Kid (2007).

Sporting a bouffant red wig, Holliday shot to national prominence on Alice in a version of the character originated by Diane Ladd in the 1974 film Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, directed by Martin Scorsese.

Both the series, which debuted in August 1976 and starred Linda Lavin, and the movie were set on the outskirts of Phoenix at the grubby Mel’s Diner. (Robert Getchell wrote the screenplay and created the show as well.)

Holliday appeared as Florence Jean Castleberry for four seasons of Alice, but amid reported tension with Lavin, she left in the 1979-80 season finale, with her character quitting Mel’s to take a hostess job as a fancy restaurant in Houston. (Ladd ostensibly replaced her as another waitress named Belle Dupree.)

“People assumed that because Flo was very big that Linda must have had her nose out of joint,” Holliday said in a 1980 interview with People magazine. “Well, Linda’s a bigger person than that.”

When her Flo spinoff came on the air in March 1980, Ms. Castleberry was now the owner of a roadhouse in Cowtown, Texas; it turned out she had bought the place in Fort Worth on a whim on her way to Houston. However, the comedy was canceled after two seasons while Alice ran through 1985. (Holliday never returned as Flo except in a flashback episode.)

For playing Flo, Holliday won Golden Globes in 1979 and 1980 and received four Emmy nominations, including two in ’80 for Alice and her own show.

Holliday was born on July 2, 1937, in Jasper, Alabama. Her mother, Velma, was a housewife and her father, Ernest, a trucker whom she rode with during summer vacations.

“We’d eat at truck stops, and there would always be a waitress like Flo with a joke ready,” she told People magazine in 1980. “The men would say all kinds of risqué things to her, but it was understood that it wasn’t serious, just a way to make everybody’s day happier.”

After graduating from Alabama College for Women near Birmingham and a year at Florida State, Holliday taught the piano before turning to acting in the 1960s, spending seven or so seasons with the Asolo Theatre Company in Sarasota, Florida.

In 1972, she appeared opposite Ruby Dee in a New York Shakespeare Festival production of Alice Childress’ Wedding Band, a World War I period piece set in South Carolina.

Two years later, Holliday made her Broadway debut in the comedy All Over Town, directed by Dustin Hoffman, and he helped her land a part as a secretary to Ned Beatty’s character in All the President’s Men (1976). 

It was Alan Shayne, the casting director on that movie and later president of Warner Bros. Television, who suggested she audition for Alice.

“I think I brought a complete knowledge of that type of woman to that role,” Holliday said in 2003. “She was a Southern woman you see in a lot of places — not well-educated but very sharp, with a sense of humor and a resolve not to let life get her down.”

Shayne also approved the idea of the spinoff for Holliday.

“We really had hoped Flo would be a big success and believe me, we did everything,” he recalled in a 2012 interview. “We changed writers, changed producers, nothing seemed to work, but God knows we tried. … The public kind of wanted her there saying, ‘Kiss my grits’ in the diner, and she became really a different character when she had her own show. She wanted to be different.”

Later, Holliday recurred on other shows including Private Benjamin, Home Improvement and The Client and guest-starred on The Golden Girls (as Rose’s blind sister, Lily), The Equalizer and Homicide: Life on the Street.

Regarding “Kiss my grits,” she called her catchphrase “pure Hollywood” in a 2003 interview. “When the writers gave it to me, I said, ‘What is this supposed to mean? Why am I saying that?’”

When fans asked her to repeat it, “I usually just smile and say, ‘Oh, I’m sure you could do it better.’”

She leaves no immediate survivors.