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Randee Heller (born June 10, 1947) is an actress known for portraying Lucille LaRusso in The Karate Kid franchise as well as its subsequent television continuation Cobra Kai. She has portrayed Lucille in seasons 1, 2, and 4 of Cobra Kai.
Early Life and Career[]
Heller was born in Brooklyn, New York City and grew up in West Hempstead, on Long Island. Her mother was raised in Brooklyn and her grandparents were from Russia. She began her career in musicals on Broadway in such shows as Grease, where she played Rizzo, and Godspell. She moved from New York to California in 1978. Her groundbreaking role as Alice on the TV series Soap received mixed reviews. The criticism at the time was not for her acting but for the stereotyping of her character. The role played into a television tradition of making lesbian characters psychologically troubled. The Boston Herald said that the characterization shows how "the networks have generally depicted lesbians either as suicidal losers or sexual predators." For example, it identifies Alice as "TV's first recurring lesbian character," noting that she "first tries to throw herself off a bridge, then falls for Jodie (Billy Crystal), a confused gay man, and finally runs off.".
Ahead of filming, producers ordered Heller's newly permed hair straightened because she said the network insisted on normalizing her character. Of a later episode in which Alice introduces her girlfriend, Heller said, "I went to kiss her in rehearsals and they said, 'No no no … you can’t do that.' I said, 'But she’s my girlfriend!' 'No, no no no, we can’t do that, we just cannot do that.' So it was so careful, it was so delicate in those days that you couldn’t really do your thing. … They wanted me to be a heterosexual homosexual." Heller would appear as a lesbian character again in a 2010 episode of Grey's Anatomy "Almost Grown," playing the partner of a female patient with a brain tumor.