Valerie Mahaffey, a character actress with a talent for playing eccentric women who sometimes proved to be sinister in television shows like “Desperate Housewives”, “Northern Exhibition” and “Devious Maids”, died on Friday in Los Angeles. She was 71 years old.
The cause was cancer, her husband, actor Joseph Kell, said in a statement, adding: “I lost the love of my life.”
Ms. Mahaffey had worked regularly in the past five decades, starting the NBC day soap opera, “The Doctors”, for which she received an Emmy day appointment for the best support actress in 1980. More recently, she appeared in the film “The 8th Day”, a criminal thriller published in March. She was also known for her roles with well -known television series such as “Seinfeld” and “Gray’s Anatomy”.
She won an Emmy for the best support actress in 1992 for her work as an EVE, a hypochondriac, on the CBS series of the 1990s “Northern Exhibition”, a drama that takes place in Alaska. She was best known for playing apparently friendly women who become nasty characters in dramas such as “Desperate Housewives”, where she appeared in nine episodes.
In her role as “home women” as Alma Hodge, she was a woman trapped in a loveless marriage that simulated her own death to return to her husband, hoping that he would be blamed for her disappearance.
More recently, she was acclaimed for her work in the black comedy of 2020, “French exit”, who saw her nominated for an independent prize for her representation of Madame Reynard, an eccentric widow as a stage.
In an interview In 2021 with Gold Derby, Ms. Mahaffey discussed the role, saying: “I know how to be funny. I made sitcoms. I know the humor ba-dum-bu.”
“Maybe it’s this moment of my life,” she added, “I don’t want artifice. And I wanted to play the truth of every moment.”
Ms. Mahaffey was born on June 16, 1953 in Sumatra, Indonesia. His mother, Jean, was Canadian, and his father, Lewis, was an American who worked in oil trade. Later, her family moved to Nigeria before settling in Austin, Texas, where she attended high school and obtained a baccalaureate in Fine Arts in 1975, from the University of Texas.
Frequent movements made her family very close, she said to the New York Times In an interview of 1983.
“We had to leave friends all the time, and so we turned to each other,” she said.
In addition to her husband, Ms. Mahaffey is survived by their daughter, Alice Richards.
