I enjoyed her work as well. RIP.
Had Willona gotten custody of Janet Jackson, not just of Penny, Janet would have turned out a lot better.
Special mention to Kim Fields’s mom, Chip, who played Penny’s abusive birth mother on the show. Really riveting dramatic work for a sitcom. I was surprised Chip Fields never got more gigs as a result. Kim was also on GT just prior to “The Facts of Life.” Chip did end up playing Kim’s (Tootie) mom on Facts, though.
As another aside about Ja’Net DuBois, she was also set to co-star in a spinoff from “Facts” in 1981. Her character was Tootie’s grandmother (in this case playing her actual age of about 50 and not the 29 or so she claimed to be on GT) and mother-in-law to Richard Dean Anderson, who was married to Rosanne Katon (Sept 1978 Playboy Playmate and close friend of Dorothy Stratten). It would’ve been like a younger version of the Willis’s from “The Jeffersons”, although theirs was a troubled marriage with the wife being a popular local tv anchor on the way up.
Anderson was fresh off of his popular run on “General Hospital.” The only problem was Anderson came off as decidedly uncomfortable in the pilot spin-off (aired as a “Facts” episode). If you had just seen him on that episode, you would not have thought he’d be taking off as a primetime tv star within the next several years.