R.I.P. Lynn Hamilton

Actress Lynn Hamilton, best known for her role as Donna Harris on Sanford and Son, has died age 95...

From The Hollywood Reporter

Lynn Hamilton, the theater-trained actress who portrayed the girlfriend of Redd Foxx’s character on Sanford and Son and the neighborly Miss Verdie on The Waltons, has died. She was 95.

Hamilton died Thursday of natural causes at her home in Chicago, her former manager and publicist, Rev. Calvin Carson, told The Hollywood Reporter.

Hamilton also starred as the matriarch Vivian Potter on the 1989-91 NBC daytime drama Generations — which had the unfortunate task of running up against CBS ratings juggernaut The Young and the Restless — and as Cissie Johnson, one of the ex-cons featured on the 1991-92 syndicated nighttime soap Dangerous Women.

She also played Cousin Georgia Anderson on the 1979 miniseries Roots: The Next Generations and had recurring roles as the snippy Emma Johnson on NBC’s 227 and as a judge on ABC’s The Practice.

The Chicago-raised actress made her big-screen debut in John Cassavetes’ Shadows (1959) and went on to appear in such other films as Brother John (1971), Buck and the Preacher (1972) — both starring Sidney Poitier — Lady Sings the Blues (1972), Leadbelly (1976) and Legal Eagles (1986).

Hamilton first appeared on NBC’s Sanford and Son on its seventh episode in February 1972, playing a landlady who gives Demond Wilson’s Lamont Sanford a hard time after he gets his own bachelor pad following an argument with his dad, Fred (Foxx).

The producers were “so impressed with that one scene that a month or two later they decided to give Fred Sanford a girlfriend,” Hamilton said in a 2009 interview. Hired to play registered nurse Donna Harris, she was told by the bawdy Foxx that his show “needed somebody dignified opposite him; he was aware of his earthliness, shall we say.”