Research for this column routinely takes me in strange directions. Mostly I went into this hoping that Ruth Buzzi would stay alive long enough for me to get to her—well, she’s 85, after all. Then I discovered that she and her husband actually collect cars, and that’s a little hard for me to wrap my brain around. There’s no reason against it; after all, you figure she’s got the money after all these years. It’s just that it’s not how you picture her. Or anyway not how I picture her.
Now, graduate of the Pasadena Playhouse? That, I can get. Quite a lot of really famous performers are. I’m a little more surprised—even more surprised than about the car thing—that her father, who is listed on Wikipedia as “a nationally recognized stone sculptor,” pretty much sculpted . . . tombstones. I mean, that’s not all. But he did found Buzzi Memorials, where her brother still makes what we’re calling memorials because people are kind of squeamish on this subject. Still, even the other sculpting isn’t necessarily something you expect to find out about when researching Funny Lady From TV and Movies.
Though she is an awfully funny lady from TV and movies. She’s in something like five minutes of The North Avenue Irregulars, and she just kills it. We find out she’s secretly a CB buff, and it’s beautiful. She’s the coach in Freaky Friday who tells the team to go after Annabel Andrews. Most of her first few movies are Disney, but then she had to do something after Laugh-In went off the air. Though she did a lot more than just a few Disney movies.
A lot of Buzzi’s work has been in animation. (Including possibly in The Rescuers, though apparently that’s unconfirmed.) This is because she has an extremely distinctive voice. You get Ruth Buzzi, you know exactly what sound you’re getting. What energy, too; her live-action style is very similar to many of her animated characters. Still, it’s got to be nice for a woman her age to just do a lot of voice work. Probably they even let her sit down to do it.
She’s one of those performers whose career is so huge that I could be here all day and not get to all of it, and the fact that I talked a fair amount about her family and car collecting and so forth doesn’t give me more room to talk about her career. Now, I’ve been known to do longer articles, but I think mostly what we need to say here is that Ruth Buzzi is a great, talented comedienne and actress who collects classic cars and lives on a horse ranch and has a brother and a father who make/made stone sculptures including tombstones. What more can any of us ask from life?