Edie McClurg

Oh, he’s very popular, Ed. The sportos, the motorheads, geeks, sluts, bloods, wastoids, dweebies, dickheads—they all adore him. They think he’s a righteous dude.

You hear it in her voice. Of course you do. We all do. She has such a distinctive voice that I’m not surprised at how many animated characters she’s played. She’s also got a distinctive look in that movie, one she created herself. The hairdresser on set didn’t know how to do that and was only really there for Mia Sara’s hair. So McClurg did it herself, because she felt Grace would feel she looked her best in the ‘60s. John Hughes responded by asking how many pencils she could fit in there; the answer turned out to be three before they fell out.

But there’s more to McClurg than Grace, even if she’s most notable in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. She got a BA from University of Missouri Kansas City, then a Master’s from Syracuse. She taught radio at UMKC for eight years, then went into broadcasting. Amazingly, she played John Ehrlichmann in a reading of the Nixon tape transcripts for NPR. She joined the Pitschel Players, a San Francisco improv troupe her brother was in, and then moved to Los Angeles and the Groundlings. She was Hermit Hattie in The Pee-Wee Herman Show.

Believe it or not, her first film role was as one of Carrie White’s tormentors in Carrie. Not one of the major ones; I had to look up her character name. She was cast, she says, as “a funny girl in glasses,” and she’s credited above Cameron De Palma as “boy on bicycle,” and he was cast for being the director’s nephew. She said all of her lines were improvised. From there, she went on to well over two hundred credits, and that includes TV shows were she did multiple episodes. She was a regular on Tony Orlando and Dawn, Herb’s wife on WKRP in Cincinnati, the Queen in Cheech & Chong’s The Corsican Brothers, Carlotta in The Little Mermaid, and all sorts of other things.

She would be primarily cast for that voice and that frumpy Midwestern appearance, but my goodness did she make it pay. I’m not as big a fan of Planes, Trains, and Automobiles as a lot of other people, but you don’t have to be to appreciate her work there. She did 88 episodes of Valerie, or, as it became known, The Hogan Family. That’s not the full series, but it’s more episodes than all but four people—ten more than Sandy Duncan did. She was even the mayor’s secretary on an episode of Portlandia.

Unfortunately, she is now in poor health; she’s a “rearrange the schedule” addition, I’m afraid. She appears to be undergoing some sort of mental decline and is under a conservatorship. I don’t know a lot of details, and it is of course none of our business anyway. Still, I hate remembering I should add people to the schedule only to discover I’d better get to them much faster than my next opening for which they are eligible (in her case, in about two years). We have such great memories of McClurg, and we’ll always be grateful for them.