Actress Liz Sheridan, best known as Jerry’s mom on the sitcom Seinfeld, has died. According to TMZ, Sheridan, passed “peacefully in her sleep from natural causes Friday at 2:30 AM.” She was 93 years old.
Born in 1929, Sheridan got her start in show business in the theater before moving to Hollywood. (During her time in New York, Sheridan also met and had a relationship with James Dean; she even wrote a book about their time together called Dizzy & Jimmy.)
From the early 1980s on, Sheridan was a fixture on television, working on series like Kojak, The A-Team, and St. Elsewhere. She appeared more than 30 times on ALF as Rachel Ochmonek, the nosy neighbor who lives next door to the Tanners, forever coming closer and closer to discovering the existence of one cat-loving alien life form.
Sheridan became even more famous playing Jerry’s mother Helen on Seinfeld. She appeared in 24 out of the series’ 180 episodes, including several highlights like “The Pen,” where Jerry and Elaine go to visit his parents at their condo in Florida, and find that life in a retirement community is extremely strange. Though Sheridan herself was not Jewish, she played one of the great Jewish mothers in TV history; deeply proud and fiercely protective of her son, and nonetheless quick to anger when she thinks he’s screwed up.
Sheridan’s death comes less than two weeks after the passing of Estelle Harris, her Seinfeld co-star Estelle Harris, who played George’s mom Estelle. This is a sad time for Seinfeld fans.
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