In Popular Culture
- Helmsley was lampooned by Nora Dunn on several episodes of Saturday Night Live in the late 1980s.
- Helmsley was a recurring character in the comic strip Zippy the Pinhead.
- Director Tim Burton stated that Helena Bonham Carter's performance as the Red Queen in the 2010 film Alice in Wonderland was partly based on her.
- One of Spy magazine's most famous "Separated at Birth" pictorials featured Helmsley side-by-side with The Joker as portrayed by Jack Nicholson.
- In Sabrina the Teenage Witch (TV series), the highschool bully, Libby Chessler is once referred to as "Leona Helmsley".
- In 30 Rock, "Succession", Season 2 Episode 13, Don Geiss (Rip Torn) compares Liz Lemmon with a young Leona Helmsley.
Read more about this topic: Leona Helmsley
Famous quotes containing the words popular culture, popular and/or culture:
“Popular culture entered my life as Shirley Temple, who was exactly my age and wrote a letter in the newspapers telling how her mother fixed spinach for her, with lots of butter.... I was impressed by Shirley Temple as a little girl my age who had power: she could write a piece for the newspapers and have it printed in her own handwriting.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“Both gossip and joking are intrinsically valuable activities. Both are essentially social activities that strengthen interpersonal bonds—we do not tell jokes and gossip to ourselves. As popular activities that evade social restrictions, they often refer to topics that are inaccessible to serious public discussion. Gossip and joking often appear together: when we gossip we usually tell jokes and when we are joking we often gossip as well.”
—Aaron Ben-Ze’Ev, Israeli philosopher. “The Vindication of Gossip,” Good Gossip, University Press of Kansas (1994)
“To assault the total culture totally is to be free to use all the fruits of mankind’s wisdom and experience without the rotten structure in which these glories are encased and encrusted.”
—Judith Malina (b. 1926)