The cause was complications from Alzheimer’s disease, said her husband, Kent Perkins. In 2022, her family announced that she had been disabled from a stroke.
Starting in the late 1960s, Ms. Buzzi found her showbiz niche as a goofball outsider and became a familiar TV face as the lean-on-me friend of star Marlo Thomas in the ABC sitcom “That Girl.”
Ms. Buzzi rarely took a break over the decades: a stint on “Sesame Street,” off-Broadway shows, commercials, cartoon voices and roles in more than 20 films. Many were B-movie blips, but some are part of the Disney catalogue, such as “Freaky Friday” (1976) and “The Apple Dumpling Gang Rides Again” (1979). A self-described “Italian Yankee” who grew up in Connecticut, she nonetheless recorded a chart-making country ballad in 1977, “You Oughta Hear the Song,” driven by a desire to take her voice “out of the showers and into the streets.”
One of her early show-business breaks proved to be pivotal to her later success on “Laugh-In.” She landed the part of frumpy Agnes Gooch in a 1960 summer stock production of the comedy “Auntie Mame” in western Pennsylvania. She toyed with various looks until one stuck: wearing a hairnet backward so it “looks like I have a bullet hole in my head,” she recalled.
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