Comic actress who was too funny for ‘Tonight Show’ host

Dody Goodman, who died on 22 June, 2008, aged 93, was a distinctive comic actress who raised the choler of Tonight Show host Jack Parr by continually upstaging him.

Parr had been enamoured by the Broadway dancer's strawberry blonde hair and ditzy persona - an act she put to great use throughout her career - and made her a regular guest on his talk show in the late '50s.

But her sharp wit soon began to steal the spotlight from the host. "Before long I began to feel like the announcer on 'The Dody Goodman Show'," he said and dropped her from his guest list in 1958.

Nevertheless, The Tonight Show proved a springboard to a career in which she had notable roles in the spoof soap opera Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman (1976), Grease (1978), Splash (1984) and numerous television series.

Dolores Goodman was born in Columbus, Ohio, on 28 October, 1914. However, she would later infamously shave 15 years off her real age to help her show business career, so for many years her birth date was given as being in 1929.

In the late 1940s she made a name for herself as a lead dancer in Broadway musicals after graduating from the Radio City Music Hall ballet company. Jack Parr spotted the comic potential of her high-pitched voice and ingénue façade when she gave interviews.

"She came on the show my second night," he said. "Soon millions of TV viewers were asking each other whether this seemingly dumb blonde was actually real. Her hesitant delivery gave the impression that her picture tube was on but her sound wasn't."

Though she was eventually dispensed with by Parr, she found other hosts were more than willing to give her air time to ramble through a series of embarrassing faux pas and malapropisms that were part of Ms Goodman's airhead character.

Her role in Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman - which satirised daytime soaps and topical events - was that of the title character's mother. No longer able to conceal the fact that she was in her middle age, it was the first of several dizzy supporting roles, including the hopeless school secretary Blanche in Grease and hopeless office assistant Mrs Stimler in Splash - she reprises her roles in the sequels to both films, one of the few cast members of either to do so.

From the 1980s she was a standard call when a dotty grandmother was needed on film or television and she voiced a similar character, the short-sighted babysitter Miss Miller, in the Alvin and the Chipmunks cartoon series. She was also a star in the off-Broadway musical Nunsense.

In 2007 she retired to the Lillian Booth Actors' Home in New Jersey. She died at nearby Englewood Hospital. A statement posted on her official website said: "All those who knew her, whether personally or through her wonderful body of work, will cherish her memory. Although her unmistakable voice on earth is stilled, we will continue to hear her with our hearts."