Grindl: Imogene Coca - Sitcoms Online Photo Galleries

Grindl ran from September 1963 until September 1964 on NBC.

In this single-season comedy series Imogene Coca played Grindl, a highly efficient well-organized domestic worker who was constantly put upon by a world that seemed determined to make life difficult for her.Grindle worked for Foster's Temporary Employment Service and each week she found herself in a different job. She was at one time or another, a maid, a laundress, a ticket-taker at a theater, a babysitter, a cook, or anything else that Anson Foster ( James Millhollin), could find for her to do.
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Here Is Imogene Coca's obituary from CNN

Actress Imogene Coca dead at 92
June 2, 2001 Posted: 2:09 p.m. EDT (1809 GMT)

WESTON, Connecticut (CNN) -- Actress Imogene Coca died Saturday in her Westport home at the age of 92.

The 5-foot-3-inch comedienne with the flexible face who co-starred with Sid Caesar on television's "Your Show of Shows" in the 1950s, died at 12:30 a.m., of natural causes, her friend Mark Basile said.

"She died a very peaceful death, she had not been ill," Basile said. "She was a great, great person, a great humanitarian, singer, dancer."

"All the wonderful times we shared meant the world to me. It was a pleasure working with her. I will miss her dearly," Caesar said from his home in Beverly Hills, California.

Coca was born November 18, 1908, in Philadelphia, an only child to Sadie Brady -- a magician's assistant and chorus girl -- and Joseph Fernandez de Coca, a violinist and orchestra conductor.

Her mother got her 11-year-old daughter her first showbiz job -- as a dancer. It paid about $2.

At age 15 she was performing in Jimmy Durante's Silver Slipper, a New York nightclub.

She made her Broadway debut in "When You Smile," starring Jeanette MacDonald, and worked in vaudeville and supper clubs.

She moved into comedy at age 26 when the heat failed in the theater as the actors were preparing to present a revue called "New Faces of 1934." Coca, who had donned an oversized overcoat to keep out the chill, was sent on stage with a young Henry Fonda by director Leonard Sillman to distract the crowd while the electricity was being fixed.

Coca started miming, which transfixed the audience, and Sillman incorporated the bit into the show.

Critics hailed the diminutive dancer as a bright new comedienne. "That's how the comedy started," Basile said.

In the 1930s and 1940s, she developed routines at Tamiment, a camp in the Catskills created by director Max Liebman. There, she worked with up-and-coming actors such as Danny Kaye and his wife Sylvia Fine.

In the late 1940s, Liebman called her and told her he had a contract to produce four shows for the new medium of television. The shows, called "Admiral's Broadway Revue," became "Your Show of Shows," with Sid Caesar. The show ran from 1950 to 1954 on NBC.

"The great thing about Imogene," said Liebman, "is that one nostril never knows what the other is doing."

Coca, who lived most of her life in New York City, had a career that spanned eight decades. A popular television guest star, she had her own variety show for a season called "The Imogene Coca Show" on NBC and, in the early 1960s, she starred in "Grindl," about a part-time worker of odd jobs.

She also had guest appearances in "Bewitched," "Moonlighting," "Playhouse 90" and "One Life to Live."

Comediennes Lily Tomlin, Whoopi Goldberg and Tracey Ullman credited her with inspiring their work.

On film, she played Aunt Edna strapped to the roof of a car in "National Lampoon's Vacation" with Chevy Chase. She also played a feature role in "Under the Yum Yum Tree" with Jack Lemmon.

"She was a phenomenal inspiration," said Basile. "The most important thing to me is that she was a great human being. What you saw was what you got."

Coca also loved to perform, he said. "You could see the exchange of energy that she was putting out and getting back from the audience."

She liked "Designing Women" and other recent-vintage television shows, but "kind of missed the gentility of a former era, when it wasn't such harsh comedy," Basile said.

Though she spent most of her life in New York City, Coca moved five years ago to Connecticut, where she had had summer homes, after her health started to fail.

"She had a great ride, a great ride," Basile said.

Coca, who had no children, was married in 1934 to Bob Burton, who arranged music for her sketches. He died in 1953. She married actor King Donovan in 1960. He died in 1987.

At Coca's request there will be no funeral service.

A lover of pets, she formed the Imogene Coca Charitable Foundation, which will donate proceeds to the Humane Society and human and civil rights groups.

Here's an Article on Imogene from people Magazine

* June 18, 2001
* Vol. 55
* No. 24

Sweet Imogene

By Tom Gliatto
A Pioneer of Live TV Comedy, Your Show of Shows' Imogene Coca Lived Softly but Left a Madcap Legacy

On a foggy night in 1973, Imogene Coca was driving with her husband, King Donovan, after the couple performed in a dinner theater in Florida. Their car suddenly collided with another. While Donovan sustained a slight leg injury, Coca, in the front passenger seat, was seriously hurt. "The rearview mirror went into my eye," the comedienne, then in her 60s, would recall. "My leg was ripped open, my cheekbone was broken and my ankle fractured."

Yet only a few years later the elfin, 5'3" trouper, a cosmetic lens covering her now-blind right eye, was back on the road for another of the periodic reunion tours she did with Sid Caesar, her leading man on the revered comedy-variety series Your Show of Shows from 1950 to 1954. Because of her impaired vision, remembers Caesar, 78, during rehearsals "I would walk her around the stage, telling her this is stage left, this is stage right." But once the curtain rose, he says, "she came out like a tiger. It was like 40 years were stripped away."

Coca, who was 92 when she died quietly of natural causes on June 2 at her home in Westport, Conn., had shown her fearlessness—and loopiness—to millions long before on Your Show of Shows. In four years of live broadcasts, she played vamps, hoboes, ballerinas and, in one trademark bit, a stripper executing bumps and grinds beneath a drab, baggy overcoat. With a cast that included Carl Reiner and a writing staff that flaunted such fledgling stars as Woody Allen, Neil Simon and Mel Brooks, Show of Shows was a mad laboratory of talent. And its Pierre and Marie Curie were Caesar and Coca, both of whom won Emmys. Even though they didn't socialize away from the set, "we had marvelous chemistry," says Caesar.

They nearly exploded into laughter in 1954 during the most famous of their 800-plus skits. Spoofing Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr's romance-in-the-surf scene in From Here to Eternity, Coca and Caesar gasped out declarations of love while being doused with buckets of water. "I suddenly realized I was drowning," Coca said in 1990, "and it struck me as funny."

Coca had a face made for mugging—"Her left nostril never knows what the right one is doing," said one of her directors, Max Liebman—softened with Chaplinesque vulnerability. If Lucille Ball set the standard for sitcom queens, Coca, who never found similar success after Show of Shows, was later cited as an influence by Carol Burnett and Lily Tomlin. Younger audiences would remember Coca as cranky Aunt Edna, who ends up dead and strapped to the roof of a station wagon in the 1983 Chevy Chase hit National Lampoon's Vacation. "She was a comedienne who would do anything," says Vacation director Harold Ramis. "She never worried about how she looked."

Actually, she did. Coca eagerly followed her father, Philadelphia orchestra conductor Joe Coca, and her mother, Sadie, an actress-dancer, onto the vaudeville stage when she was only 11, but even as an established star, she could barely stand to watch herself on tape or film. Shy and almost phobic about travel, she was accompanied everywhere by her second husband, Donovan, whom she wed in 1960. (First husband Robert Burton, an actor, had died in 1955.) She and Donovan, who died in 1987, "were inseparable," says Vacation producer Matty Simmons.

Coca also had a lifelong passion for animals, especially poodles and Persian cats. "And in the early 1960s," says her friend, actor Mark Basile, "she had a crippled duck named Grover Cleveland."

But to the public, her significant other would always be Caesar, in part because they were so believable as Show of Shows' squabbling couple, the Hickenloopers. As late as 1990, Coca, who was childless, admitted she still didn't know what made them click. "There's no way of figuring out something like that," she said. "If anyone ever does, he'll probably win a Nobel Prize."

Tom Gliatto
Bruce Stockier in New York City and NF Mendoza in Los Angeles

To read some articles about Grindl go to http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=lOUcAAAAIBAJ&sjid=_pYEAAAAIBAJ&dq=imogene%20coca&pg=6931%2C3696544 and http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=XOhTAAAAIBAJ&sjid=4jgNAAAAIBAJ&dq=grindl%20imogene%20coca&pg=2635%2C3658343 and http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=V0cyAAAAIBAJ&sjid=xOUFAAAAIBAJ&dq=grindl%20imogene%20coca&pg=6968%2C5605131 and http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=A3VFAAAAIBAJ&sjid=abwMAAAAIBAJ&dq=grindl%20imogene%20coca&pg=3690%2C1475033

For an episode guide go to http://ctva.biz/US/Comedy/Grindl.htm