Sad news as we learn the actress behind Lumpy (Lumpawaroo), Chewbacca’s son in the 1978 Star Wars Holiday Special has passed. 3′ 11″ actress Patty Maloney was 89 and appeared on screen with the late Carrie Fisher twice, in the aforementioned Holiday Special and in 1981’s Under The Rainbow, but it’s The Holiday Special that the GFFA will remember her for.
Few were impressed with anything or anyone having to do with The Star Wars Holiday Special, which aired the week before Thanksgiving in 1978 on CBS and featured Star Wars actors alongside the likes of Bea Arthur, Art Carney and Harvey Korman.
A few years after it ran, George Lucas reportedly said, “If I had the time and a sledgehammer, I would track down every bootlegged copy of the program and smash it.”
Maloney was central to the family-friendly plot as the son of Chewbacca, played by Peter Mayhew, who had originated the role in the first Star Wars film. (The special also introduced Chewbacca’s father and wife.)
Her Lumpy costume “was made of all human hair, which made it very, very warm,” she recalled in a 2008 interview. “I remember I was doing something on The Towering Inferno, doing a stunt on that, and I had to go over after shooting all day to Stan Winston’s for the face, because he did the head — he did the make-up and the electronics in the head.”
