Polly Holliday
American actress
Polly Dean Holliday (July 2, 1937 – September 9, 2025) was an American actress of stage and screen. Holliday was best known for her portrayal of sassy waitress Florence Jean "Flo" Castleberry on the 1970s sitcom Alice, winning two Golden Globe Awards for Best Supporting Actress on the series. Her character's catchphrase "Kiss my grits!" enjoyed widespread popularity, and she reprised the role on Flo, a short-lived spin-off. Holliday won the 1984 Saturn Award for Best Supporting Actress portraying Ruby Deagle in Gremlins.
Early life
Polly Dean Holliday was born in Jasper, Alabama, on July 2, 1937, the daughter of Ernest Sullivan Holliday, a truck driver, and Velma Mabell Holliday (née Cain). She grew up in Childersburg; her brother Doyle was a boyhood friend of Jim Nabors, who lived in nearby Sylacauga.
Holliday attended the Alabama College for Women at Montevallo (now known as the University of Montevallo) in the late 1950s where she excelled in the theater department, playing the lead roles in The Lady's Not for Burning and Medea. She graduated in 1959 with a degree in piano. She went on to Florida State University, and spent the first phase of her career earning respect on the classical stage.
Holliday worked as a piano teacher in her native Alabama, and then in Florida.
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The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 31, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q289743. VIAF identifies the subject as 30974840. The Library of Congress control number is n85168555. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1937, 2025, 1984 and 1959.
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This entry incorporates text from “Polly Holliday” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.