Patty Maloney, 'Far Out Space Nuts' & 'Star Wars Holiday Special' Star, Dies at 89

Patty Maloney, one of the most famous and successful little person actors in Hollywood history, died Monday at 89 following a series of strokes, THR reports.

Maloney's career began at 12, when she saw little people performing in a carnival and realized, "If they can do it, I can do it, too."

Her parents allowed her to spend a summer with the show, a full-on vaudeville performance featuring "miniature people" as celebrity look-alikes and in elaborate dance numbers.

After that, she performed with the Ringling Brothers circus — but it was no old-fashioned freak show. "I had a great childhood," she recalled to interviewer Joan Quinn in 1994. "And it was all my choosing."

As a young woman, she honed her dance skills in New York, but left show business while married for seven years. The sudden death of her husband propelled her back into entertainment.

Maloney appeared in the TV movies "Don't Be Afraid of the Dark" (1973) and "Punch and Jody" (1974) before landing one of her most famous roles, playing space alien Honk on the Sid & Marty Krofft Saturday-morning kids' show "Far Out Space Nuts" (1975).

As outrageous as the show was, it wasn't the wildest thing on her résumé, which included appearing on the camp "Brady Bunch Variety Hour" (1976 & 1977) and in the TV movie "The Bay City Rollers Meet the Saturday Superstars" (1978).

Most notoriously, she played Chewbacca's son Lumpy in the widely derided "Star Wars Holiday Special," a discofied disaster from 1978 that became a holy grail for collectors in the pre-digital era.

There is a video on YouTube of Lumpy clapping — for an hour.

She was in "Under the Rainbow" (1981), about what went on behind the scenes during the filming of "The Wizard of Oz," as well as "Swing Shift" (1984), "Ernest Saves Christmas" (1988), "The Addams Family" (1991), and "Twin Falls Idaho" (1999).

Other work included a voice part in the Ralph Bakshi animated version of "The Lord of the Rings" (1978) and appearances on the hits "Charlie's Angels" (1977), "Rhoda" (1977), "The Love Boat" (1978), "Little House on the Prairie" (1982), "Married... with Children" (1990), and "My Name Is Earl" (2005), her final performance.

She worked extensively with Hollywood's most iconic little person, the late Billy Barty, saying in 1994, "I spent a lot of my career playing Billy Barty's wife... Just about every time he had a wife, I was the one that was the wife."

While she voiced Darla on an animated "The Little Rascals" (1982-1983), one thing she never did in her career was stand-in work for child actors — child actors stood in for her.

As of the 1990s, Maloney was belting onstage in a one-woman show.

She is survived by her brother, nieces and her brother-in-law.