Screen Time

Movin’ on up — Zara Cully ’s journey from Worcester to TV’s Mother Jefferson

Craig S. Semon Worcester Magazine | USA TODAY NETWORK

When “The Jeffersons” moved on up to the east side to a deluxe apartment in the sky, one of the most popular characters in the fictitious TV was played by Worcester native Zara Cully.

Wednesday, Jan. 26, would have been Cully’s 130th Birthday.

Acclaimed as being “one of the world’s greatest elocutionists” in the 1940s in New York City, the five-foottwo, 125-pound actress did not achieve real fame until she secured the scene-stealing role of Olivia “Mother Jefferson” Jefferson on the hit CBS sitcom, “The Jeffersons.”

Zara portrayed the character on the series beginning in 1975 until her death in 1978.

Whether taking a little nap or nip in the form of a Bloody Mary (which she claimed she drank “for the vitamins”), Cully added lightness to the show as she needled her daughter-in-law Louise “Weezie” Jefferson (Isabel Sanford), spoiled her grandson, Lionel (first played by Mike Evans and later Damon Evans; no relation), and proclaimed that her dry-cleaning mogul son, George Jefferson (Sherman Hemsley), could do no wrong.

Yvette Porter Moore of San Diego is the family’s historian and genealogist. Cully was Moore’s great-aunt and her grandmother’s sister.

“I loved the parts when she would hit George Jefferson with the purse. That always got to me. And I just loved some of her facial expressions,” Moore said with a hearty laugh. “It was always a treat to see her on TV.”

“Isn’t this nice. Here I am in my golden years in the home of my wonderful son and my handsome grandson,” Mother Jefferson enthusiastically says before her voice trails off as she frowns, “and my daughter-inlaw.”

Moore said Aunt Zara was the total opposite of Olivia Jefferson, her television alter-ego.

“She always gave Weezie a hard time,” Moore said. “Looking at her character (on “The Jeffersons”) and looking at who she was, she was a very sweet motherin-law in real life. She was very supportive of her family.”

In an interview she did for the Archive of American Television, Isabel Sanford spoke about Cully.

“Wednesday, we would read the script and she’d say, ‘Oh, I have to be mean to you again this week,” Sanford recalled. “I said, ‘If you want your job, you be mean to me this week and every other week.”

Despite being a distinguished actress, drama coach, director and writer whose career spanned 50 years before she died at the age of 86, Cully will always be best known as Mother Jefferson, a character she

When she was 82, Zara Cully, who was born and raised in Worcester, became an overnight sensation playing Olivia “Mother Jefferson” Jefferson on the hit CBS TV sitcom “The Jeffersons.” Wednesday, Jan. 26, marks what would be Cully’s 130th birthday.

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first played on an episode of “All in the Family” entitled “Lionel’s Engagement,” which aired Feb. 9, 1974. She was 82 years old at the time.

With her precise manner of speaking, her perfectly coiffed hair and her sheer elegance, Cully effortlessly stole every scene that she was in. She was a sassy, classic, petite lady that could stand toe-to-toe with Archie Bunker (Carol O’Connor).

“Hey there (George) Jefferson, that ain’t very nice talking that way to your little mammy here,” Archie said.

Waiting for the audience’s laughter to subside, Mrs. Jefferson rolls her eyes and then roars, “Who you calling mammy? … Don’t you dare call me mammy! I’m nobody’s mammy! I’m his mother. Now, if you got anything to say to me, you call me Mrs. Jefferson.”

With that quick verbal exchange, a memorable television character was born.

In an interview she did for the Archive of American Television, Marla Gibbs, who played another scenestealer, Florence Johnson, the Jeffersons’ wisecracking maid, called Cully “a delight.”

“She would always be on Sherman’s side … You don’t need a maid with this itty, bitty house,’ she said. (And I would say) ‘Well, your son is the one who wants me here.’ She said, ‘Well, on the other hand … I guess he needs someone to keep the house clean for a change,’” Gibbs recalled. “She had a way of just breaking these sentences up that was just perfect.”

“The Jeffersons” became a spin-off on Jan. 18, 1975. In its first season, “The Jeffersons” ranked at number four, surpassed by its parent series “All in the Family,” which landed at number one for the 50 year in a row.

“As Aunt Zara was growing up, acting was something that she wanted to do. She was very talented,” Moore said. “I don’t think the success of ‘The Jeffersons’ surprised her but she only wanted to take roles that met with her own standards of who she was.”

Except for the rare exception of Sidney Poitier, Lena Horne and Bill Cosby, Cully grew up in a time when Black actors and actresses were usually portrayed as butlers, maids and servants on a good day, and pimps, prostitutes, drug-pushers and voodoo priests and priestesses on every other day.

In 1974’s Blaxploitation zombie film “Sugar Hill,” Cully played Mama Maitresses, a former voodoo queen who comes out of retirement to help Diana “Sugar” Hill (Marki Bey) whose boyfriend was killed by the mob. In no time, Mama Maitresse is summoning the voodoo lord of the dead, Baron Samedi (Don Pedro Colley), who enlists his army of zombies to destroy the men who killed Sugar Hill’s boyfriend.

“They had snakes in ‘Sugar Hill’ and Aunt Zara was scared of snakes. And she was like, I will not do it, doesn’t matter how much money it is,” Moore recalled. “I don’t know what made her change her mind but she ended up playing that role in the movie, Mama Maitresse. I do not know for sure and I have to look back if she actually held the snake or not, because that was one of the things that she didn’t want to do.”

Zara’s parents, Ambrose E. and Nora Ann (Gilliam) Cully, were born and raised in New Bern, Craven County, North Carolina, and, in 1880, relocated to Worcester.

At a meeting at Belmont AME Zion Church in Worcester, the newly-born Sons and Daughters of North Carolina chose Zara’s father, Ambrose Cully, who was the music director of the church, to be the group’s secretary. (Worcester Spy, 12 Nov. 1889).

“On her father’s side, Ambrose’s family, they were free people of color. So they had been free since the late