Helen Martin

Helen Martin was an American stage and television actress whose career spanned over 60 years. Born in St. Louis and raised in Nashville in a family of musicians, she left Fisk University after two years to pursue acting, moved to Chicago and then New York, and trained with the WPA Theater and the Rose McClendon Players. She helped found the American Negro Theater in Harlem and worked for decades as a Broadway character actress, from her 1937 debut in Orchids Preferred to Orson Welles's 1941 production of Native Son and a dozen shows that included The Blacks, Purlie Victorious, The Amen Corner and Raisin. She reached a wider audience as Wanda Williams on Good Times and Pearl Shay on 227, and played grandmothers in Hollywood Shuffle (1987), House Party 2 (1991), Don't Be a Menace to South Central While Drinking Your Juice in the Hood (1996) and I Got the Hook Up (1998). She died in 2000.