Veteran character actress and star of stage and screen Alice Drummond has died at 88, according to the New York Times. Drummond, who was active in theater and film since the 1960s, is perhaps best remembered by contemporary audiences as a small, but fiesty comedic presence at the heart of big comedies like Ace Ventura — in which she played the surprisingly foul-mouthed, cookie-baking mother of a vengeful football player (“Laces out”) — or Ghostbusters — in which she played the spooked New York public librarian who first experiences the paranormal underbelly of Gotham. But long before she was a go-to in film comedies, Drummond made a splash on Broadway, acting in everything from Edward Albee to Hart-Kaufman plays throughout the ’60s and ’70s. Her most memorable onscreen role may have been in the 1990 film Awakenings, where she played a once-catatonic, then–comically defiant, very-awake patient to Robin Williams’s put-upon doctor. A lifelong New Yorker, Ms. Drummond died in the Bronx. She will be missed.
