Valerie Mahaffey, a character actress with a knack for playing eccentric women who sometimes revealed themselves to be sinister on television shows like \u201cDesperate Housewives,\u201d \u201cNorthern Exposure\u201d and \u201cDevious Maids,\u201d died on Friday in Los Angeles. She was 71.<\/p>\n
The cause was cancer, her husband, the actor Joseph Kell, said in a statement.<\/p>\n
Ms. Mahaffey had worked steadily over the past five decades. Her first significant role was on the NBC daytime soap opera \u201cThe Doctors,\u201d for which she received a Daytime Emmy nomination for best supporting actress in 1980. She was seen most recently in the movie \u201cThe 8th Day,\u201d a crime thriller released in March.<\/p>\n
She was also known for her guest-starring roles on prominent TV series, including \u201cSeinfeld\u201d \u2014 on which she memorably played an accountant who is dating Jerry\u2019s friend George Costanza and offers to help Jerry with his taxes \u2014 and \u201cGrey\u2019s Anatomy.\u201d<\/p>\n
She won an Emmy for best supporting actress in 1992 for her work as Eve, a hypochondriac, on the \u201cNorthern Exposure,\u201d the CBS comedy-drama about a New York doctor who moves to a small town in Alaska.<\/p>\n
Ms. Mahaffey was best known for playing seemingly friendly women who become villainous on dramas like \u201cDesperate Housewives,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Valerie Mahaffey, a character actress with a knack for playing eccentric women who sometimes revealed themselves to be sinister on television shows like \u201cDesperate Housewives,\u201d \u201cNorthern Exposure\u201d and \u201cDevious Maids,\u201d 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":10446,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10445","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-memorial"],"yoast_head":"\n