LOS ANGELES — Clarice Taylor, an actress best known for portraying the self-possessed Grandmother Huxtable on the hit television sitcom “The Cosby Show,” died Monday. She was 93.

Taylor died of congestive heart failure at her home in Englewood., N.J.

Bill Cosby said she was “perfect” as the mother of his character, Cliff Huxtable, on the NBC series that aired from 1984 to 1992 except she looked “young enough to play my sister.”

“She did stand-up comedy. She and I were not of the ‘theatuh’ per se, we are performers,” Cosby told the Los Angeles Times on Wednesday. “So whenever I’d say something to her about doing something, I just talked to her the way comedians talk.”

After appearing in the original Broadway production of “The Wiz” in the late 1970s, Taylor toured with the show and roomed with Phylicia Rashad, who would play Cosby’s wife on the TV series.

Taylor first auditioned to play Rashad’s mother but eventually was cast as Cosby’s.

“I put on a gray wig, a bandana over that, flat-heeled shoes and a long dress with no shape to it,” Taylor told The Associated Press in 1987. “Bill saw through my act. I read five lines, and he said, ‘If you’re going to go through all of this, you’ve got the part.’ ”