Valerie Mahaffey, a character actress with a knack for playing eccentric women who sometimes revealed themselves to be sinister on television shows like “Desperate Housewives,” “Northern Exposure” and “Devious Maids,” died on Friday in Los Angeles. She was 71
The cause was cancer, her husband, the actor Joseph Kell, said in a statement.
Ms. Mahaffey had worked steadily over the past five decades. Her first significant role was on the NBC daytime soap opera “The Doctors,” for which she received a Daytime Emmy nomination for best supporting actress in 1980. She was seen most recently in the movie “The 8th Day,” a crime thriller released in March.
She was also known for her guest-starring roles on prominent TV series, including “Seinfeld” — on which she memorably played an accountant who is dating Jerry’s friend George Costanza and offers to help Jerry with his taxes — and “Grey’s Anatomy.”
She won an Emmy for best supporting actress in 1992 for her work as Eve, a hypochondriac, on the “Northern Exposure,” the CBS comedy-drama about a New York doctor who moves to a small town in Alaska.
Ms. Mahaffey was best known for playing seemingly friendly women who become villainous on dramas like “Desperate Housewives,” where she appeared in nine episodes. Her character, Alma Hodge, was a woman trapped in a loveless marriage who faked her own death to get back at her husband, hoping that he would be blamed for her disappearance.
She most recently won acclaim in 2020 for her work in the dark comedy “French Exit.” She was nominated for an Independent Spirit Award for her scene-stealing portrayal of an eccentric widow.
In an interview in 2021 with the GoldDerby YouTube channel, Ms. Mahaffey discussed the role. “I know how to be funny,” she said. “I’ve done sitcoms. I know ba-dum-bum humor.”
“Maybe it’s this point in my life,” she added. “I don’t want any artifice. And I wanted to play the truth of every moment.”
She also said then that she often ended up playing characters who were “a little askew,” which she said was aligned with how people are in reality.
Ms. Mahaffey was born on June 16, 1953, in Sumatra, Indonesia. Her mother, Jean, was Canadian, and her father, Lewis, was an American who worked in the oil business. Her family later moved to Nigeria before eventually settling in Austin, Texas, where she attended high school and went on to earn a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 1975 from the University of Texas.
The frequent moves made her family very close, she told The New York Times in a 1983 interview.
“We had to leave friends behind all the time, and so we turned toward one another,” she said.
In addition to her husband, Ms. Mahaffey is survived by their daughter, Alice Richards. She lived in Los Angeles.00
