Imogene Coca 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 pursued a serious career in music and dance, graduating to decades of stage musical revues, cabaret, and summer stock. In her 40s, she began a celebrated career as a comedian on television, starring in six series and guest-starring on successful television programs from the 1940s to the '90s.
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.
She possessed 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".