Helen Martin
Helen Martin is an actor, born 1909.
Martin was a stage actor for decades before most people ever saw her face. She was an original member of the American Negro Theater and a Broadway character actor across a long run of productions, and the screen career that made her recognisable did not take hold until the 1970s. Her earliest film credit here is Helen Ward in the 1955 crime picture The Phenix City Story, and then a long gap.
Television is where it turned. Sanford and Son, Maude, Starsky & Hutch, What's Happening!!, and, from 1974, Wanda Williams on Good Times, the role that made her familiar. Then Pearl Shay on 227 from 1985, the neighbour part that carried her through the rest of the decade.
What she was good at was compression. She could take a single line and land a whole personality with it, usually a small, sharp, elderly woman whose comic function was to say the rude thing the scene had been avoiding. Film used her that way constantly: Mrs. Parks in Repo Man, Bobby's Grandmother in Robert Townsend's Hollywood Shuffle, Mrs. Deevers in House Party 2, Loc Dog's Grandma in Don't Be a Menace to South Central While Drinking Your Juice in the Hood, Alma Lee Brown in Death Wish, Maddie in Doc Hollywood, Nana Cross in Kiss the Girls. More than sixty years of work, nearly all of it in support, and a great deal of it stolen outright from whoever was standing next to her.
Movies (11)
TV (9)
Where to start with Helen Martin
Pearl Shay is the role built for exactly what she does, a neighbour with a window and an opinion, so 227 is the natural starting point and it gives her room across a whole run.
Before that, Good Times has Wanda, the part that first made audiences recognise her, and Sanford and Son catches her in the earlier era of the same kind of work.
The films are where she does the most damage in the least time. Hollywood Shuffle is the best of them, Robert Townsend's furious low-budget satire of what Hollywood was offering Black actors, and her scenes are among its sharpest. Repo Man uses her strangeness perfectly, Don't Be a Menace to South Central While Drinking Your Juice in the Hood gives her the most quoted comic turn of her late career, and Death Wish with Kiss the Girls show what she could do inside a straight dramatic frame.