She was a Rae of comic sunshine…departed at the age of 92, the kindly character actress Charlotte Rae. For most people, she was the star of “Diff’rent Strokes” and “The Facts of Life,” but she had spent decades perfecting her craft in many memorables roles on stage and screen.
Charlotte Rae Lubotsky (April 22, 1926 – August 5, 2018), like Jackie Mason, was Jewish and grew up in the somewhat unlikely state of Wisconsin. Hardly the stereotype of the Lower East Side comedienne, she attended Northwestern University, and met other budding performers including Cloris Leachman and Paul Lynde.
Charlotte, like Lynde, moved to New York City and worked some of the chi-chi local clubs, including the Village Vanguard. Lynde was part of the “New Faces” revue and Rae turned up in “The Littlest Revue,” produced by Ben Bagley. Slightly neurotic in comic personality, something shared by “age of anxiety” colleagues like Lynde and Alice Ghostley, her material was smart and clever, but often delivered with that tremor of wan comic distaste, as if a breakdown was coming any minute.
She even put out her own solo comedy album, the 1955 collection “Songs I Taught My Mother: Silly, Sinful, and Satirical Selections.” I mentioned it in my book the "Goldmine Comedy Record Price Guide," and that after all these years, a few cuts still resonate. One of them is "Merry Minuet," a dark satire on world mayhem and violence from Sheldon Harnick. Sheldon (better known for "Fiddler on the Roof") was yet another Northwestern University classmate of Charlotte's. I was probably one of the few to mention that record to her, in talking about her many achievements.
Her brief foray into comedy records done, she busied herself with Broadway roles (she was nominated for a Tony twice) and variety shows and sitcoms broadcast in New York City. She appeared on “The Colgate Comedy Hour” and “Car 54 Where Are You,” where she played the fretful wife of Officer Schnauzer (Al Lewis).
In 1974 she memorably played a neurotic Tupperware saleswoman on an episode of “All in the Family,” and starred in Norman Lear’s short-lived sitcom version of “Hot L Baltimore.” Lear cast her in “Diff’rent Strokes,” and she went on to star in the sequel. The fact of life for the now-aging veteran, was that sitcom work was very strenuous. As the girls in the show aged, and there wasn’t as much conflict for her Mrs. Garrett character to deal with. She was glad to be written out of some episodes, and then she left after the seventh season, replaced by Cloris Leachman (brought in to play her character’s sister).
A more perplexing fact of life for the charmingly chubby funny lady was learning that her husband was homosexual. His coming out led to an end in their marriage. They were wed in 1951 and divorced in 1976. Six years later, Charlotte began to suffer health problems. She had a pacemaker implanted and that allowed her to keep working at her chosen pace, which included a “Facts of Life” reunion movie in 2001. Some years later, she underwent chemotherapy, but last year, she was diagnosed with bone cancer. Her last film appearance was in “Ricki and the Flash” (2015), but she left behind so many stage memories, and a legacy of television work. For those who think they know Charlotte from her typecasted comedy work…just consider where she came from on the Broadway stage: “Mrs. Peachum” in the decadent “Threepenny Opera” of 1954, and the truculent hillbilly “Mammy Yokum,” in “Li’l Abner.” In 1989, still up for a challenging theatrical role, she starred in a Chicago production of “Driving Miss Daisy.”
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