WASHINGTON — British actress Judy Carne, whose main claim to American fame was as the “Sock It to Me Girl” on the TV show “Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In,” has died. She was 76.
Carne died Thursday in Northampton, England, where she was born, on Thursday. She had been living in the nearby village of Pitsford, The Hollywood Reporter reports.
The daughter of two greengrocers, Carne, born Joyce Audrey Botterill, was on two British TV shows in the early 1960s, then headed to the U.S. just as all things British were catching on. She appeared on three American sitcoms as well as “The Man From U.N.C.L.E.”
She was only a regular on the first two seasons of “Laugh-In,” in 1968 and 1969, making occasional appearances later. But her catch phrase, “sock it to me,” which inevitably led to her being doused with water and being victimized by other pranks, lived on for years.
She was married to Burt Reynolds from 1963 to 1965; they divorced amid accusations that Reynolds was abusive to her. He reportedly helped Carne later, however, when drug addiction and financial problems threatened her life and well-being.
Carne left “Laugh-In” for fear of being typecast, the Northampton News reports, and went on to star on Broadway and TV, but without surpassing her earlier success. In 1985, she documented her decline in her autobiography, “Laughing on the Outside, Crying on the Inside: The Bittersweet Saga of the Sock-It-To-Me Girl,” and appeared in a Laugh-In reunion in 1993.
By then she’d moved to Pitsford, where she lived a quiet life with her two dogs. The remembrances from friends and acquaintances collected by the Northampton News have as much to do with her dogs as her fame.
