page_title: Imogene Coca
section_title: Career
hierarchical_section_title: Imogene Coca / Career
caption_attribution_description: English: Publicity photo of Imogene Coca and Billy Booth promoting the episode "Aunt Grindl" for the television series Grindl.
context_page_description: Imogene Coca was an American comic actress best known for her role opposite Sid Caesar on Your Show of Shows. Starting out in vaudeville as a child acrobat, she studied ballet and wished to have a serious career in music and dance, graduating to decades of stage musical revues, cabaret and summer stock. In her 40s, she began a celebrated career as a comedian on television, starring in six series and guest starring on successful television programs from the 1940s to the 1990s.
  She was nominated for five Emmy Awards for Your Show of Shows, winning Best Actress in 1951 and singled out for a Peabody Award for excellence in broadcasting in 1953. Coca was also nominated for a Tony Award in 1978 for On the Twentieth Century and received a sixth Emmy nomination at the age of 80 for an episode of Moonlighting.
  She possessed a rubbery face capable of the broadest expressions — Life magazine compared her to Beatrice Lillie and Charlie Chaplin and described her characterizations as taking "people or situations suspended in their own precarious balance between dignity and absurdity, and push them over the cliff with one single, pointed gesture".
context_section_description: She played opposite Sid Caesar on The Admiral Broadway Revue (January to June 1949), and then in the sketch comedy program Your Show of Shows, which was immensely popular from 1950 to 1954, winning the Emmy for Outstanding Variety Series in 1952 and 1953. The 90-minute show was aired live on NBC every Saturday night in prime time. She won the second-ever Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Comedy Series in 1951 and was nominated for four other Emmys for her work in the show. She won a 1953 Peabody Award for excellence in broadcasting. Her success in that program earned her her own series, The Imogene Coca Show, which ran 1954-55.
  Prior to working with Caesar she had starred in an early ABC series, Buzzy Wuzzy, which lasted four episodes in 1948. She went on to star in two more series.  In the 1963–64 TV season, Coca portrayed a comic temporary helper in the NBC sitcom Grindl. It competed with the second half of The Ed Sullivan Show and lasted only one season. Coca later starred as a cave woman with Joe E. Ross in the 1966–67 time-travel satire sitcom It's About Time.
  She continued to appear on comedy and variety series throughout the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s and 1980s including several appearances each on The Carol Burnett Show, The George Gobel Show, The Hollywood Palace and Ed Sullivan's Toast of the Town and Bob Hope specials. She appeared on other shows and specials by Dean Martin, Jackie Gleason, Jerry Lewis, Dick Clark, Danny Kaye and Andy Williams. The Sid Caesar, Imogene Coca, Carl Reiner and Howard Morris Special won a 1967 Emmy for Outstanding Variety Special.
  She made memorable guest appearances on sitcoms including two appearances on Bewitched, The Brady Bunch and Mama's Family. She appeared with Milton Berle and Your Show of Shows co-star Howard Morris in "Curtain Call", a 1983 episode of Fantasy Island.
  Coca appeared in a number of literary adaptations for children. In 1960 she was Miss Clavel in Sol Saks' adaptation of Ludwig Bemelmans' Madeline for Shirley Temple's Storybook. In 1972, she voiced the character of Princess Jane Klockenlocher in The Enchanted World of Danny Kaye, a Rankin/Bass version of Hans Christian Andersen's The Emperor's New Clothes. In 1978, she appeared in A Special Sesame Street Christmas. In 1985, she played The Cook in Alice in Wonderland, an all-star TV miniseries adaptation of the book by Lewis Carroll. Among her final roles was voicing characters in Garfield and Friends.
  In 1988, Coca appeared as the mother of Allyce Beasley's Agnes in the Moonlighting episode "Los Dos Dipestos", written by David Steinberg. She received her sixth Emmy nomination, as Outstanding Guest Performer in a Drama Series, for the role. The same year she was the female recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award in Comedy at the second annual American Comedy Awards, alongside male recipient George Burns.
  Coca appeared only sporadically in films such as The Incredible Incident at Independence Square, filmed in her hometown of Philadelphia, as well as Under the Yum Yum Tree (1963), Nothing Lasts Forever, Papa Was a Preacher, Buy & Cell and National Lampoon's Vacation (1983), as "Aunt Edna".
  After having appeared in several Broadway musical-comedy revues and plays between the 1930s and the 1950s, Coca returned to Broadway at the age of 70 with a Tony Award-nominated performance as religious zealot Letitia Primrose in On the Twentieth Century, a 1978 stage musical adapted from the film Twentieth Century (1934). Her role, that of a religious fanatic who plasters decals onto every available surface, had been a male in both the film and the original stage production, and was rewritten specifically as a vehicle for Coca. She appeared in the Broadway run with Kevin Kline and Madeline Kahn, continued with the national tour starring Rock Hudson and Judy Kaye and returned for a later tour revival in the mid-1980s with Kaye and Frank Gorshin. She also co-starred with singer Maxine Sullivan in My Old Friends and touring productions including musicals such as Once Upon a Mattress and Bells Are Ringing and 
caption: With Billy Booth in the NBC comedy series Grindl, circa 1964.
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