Imogene Fernandez de Coca (November 18, 1908 – June 2, 2001) was an American comic actress best known for her role opposite Sid Caesar on Your Show of Shows. Starting out in vaudeville as a child acrobat, she studied ballet and wished to have a serious career in music and dance, graduating to decades of stage musical revues, cabaret and summer stock. Finally in her 40s she began a celebrated career as a comedienne in television, starring in six series and guesting on successful television programs from the 1940s to the 1990s.

She was nominated for five Emmy awards for Your Show of Shows, winning Best Actress in 1951 and singled out for a Peabody Award for excellence in broadcasting in 1953. Coca was also nominated for a Tony Award in 1978 for On the Twentieth Century and received a sixth Emmy nomination at the age of 80 for an episode of Moonlighting.

Though possessing a rubbery face capable of the broadest expressions—Life magazine compared her to Beatrice Lillie and Charlie Chaplin, and described her characterizations as taking "people or situations suspended in their own precarious balance between dignity and absurdity, and push(ing) them over the cliff with one single, pointed gesture"—the magazine noted a "particularly high-brow critic" as observing, "The trouble with most comedians who try to do satire is that they are essentially brash, noisy and indelicate people who have to use a sledge hammer to smash a butterfly. Miss Coca, on the other hand, is the timid woman who, when aroused, can beat a tiger to death with a feather."

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License.
It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Imogene Coca." | Wiki History
Related Topics
Watercooler Stories
Jockstrip: The world as we know it.
Your Daily Horoscope
The almanac
NBA: LA Lakers 110, New Orleans 99
NHL: Los Angeles Kings 4, Anaheim 3
NHL: San Jose 5, Ottawa 2
fark
There's a 30-percent chance your Christmas lights will kill you
Cocktail waitress claims Tiger Woods scored another hole in one (w/pic)
Woman suffers from mysterious disorder that turns her into a sex addict while she's asleep. Well,...
Photoshop these two two-day-old zebrafish
Unbelievable pics of how a coyote managed to survive being hit by a Honda, lucky for him it wasn't...
Google manages to pick 3rd worst option out of 2