Linda Lavin, the Tony Award-winning Broadway actress who was best known for starring as a waitress and single mom on the long-running sitcom “Alice,” died on Sunday in Los Angeles. She was 87.
Her death was confirmed by Michael Gagliardo, a representative, who said the cause was complications from lung cancer.
To most American television viewers, Ms. Lavin was a new face when “Alice” — a comedy based on “Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore,” Martin Scorsese’s 1974 drama film starring Ellen Burstyn — had its premiere. Playing a widowed mother who, on her way to pursue a musical career in Los Angeles, takes a job at Mel’s Diner after her car breaks down, Ms. Lavin wasn’t yet widely known. But to theatergoers, especially in New York, she was a known quantity, having performed in eight Broadway productions between 1962 and 1973, including the lead role in Neil Simon’s “Last of the Red Hot Lovers” (1969).
“Alice” ran from 1976 to 1985 and earned Ms. Lavin two Golden Globe Awards and an Emmy nomination. After the show ended, she promptly returned to her first love, the New York stage, and in 1987 won the Tony Award for best actress in a play for her role as Kate Jerome, a 1940s Brooklyn matriarch facing the postwar world, in Mr. Simon’s “Broadway Bound.”
In his review of the play in The New York Times, Frank Rich called the character “a remarkable achievement — a Jewish mother who redefines the genre even as she gets the requisite laughs while fretting over her children’s health or an unattended pot roast.” Kate is “a woman who takes ‘her own quiet pleasure’ in a world that goes no farther than her subway line,” Mr. Rich wrote.
“One only wishes,” he added, “that Ms. Lavin, whose touching performance is of the same high integrity as the writing, could stay in the role forever.”
Linda Lavin was born on Oct. 15, 1937, in Portland, Maine, the second child of David Joseph Lavin, a businessman, and Lucille (Potter) Lavin, a former operatic soprano. All four of her grandparents were Jewish immigrants from Russia.
Ms. Lavin began performing as a child and majored in theater at William & Mary in Williamsburg, Va.
In the late 1950s, she was a member of the Compass Players, an improvisational cabaret group that was a precursor of Second City. After some time working a theater job in Boston, she moved to New York — her first roommate was a fellow aspiring actress, Olympia Dukakis — and made her New York stage debut in an Off Broadway musical, “Oh, Kay!” in 1960. Ms. Lavin’s Broadway debut came two years later, in multiple roles in the musical “A Family Affair,” directed by Hal Prince.
Although she had appeared on a few episodes of “The Doctors,” a soap opera, in 1963, her television career didn’t flourish until 1975, when she had a recurring role as a police detective on the hit sitcom “Barney Miller.” Her own series, “Alice,” came along the next year.
Films were not a notable part of Ms. Lavin’s career, at first. She was at the height of her fame, in the final season of “Alice,” when — in her mid-40s — she finally made her movie debut. It was a celebrity cameo as a seemingly nice doctor who twists Kermit the Frog all out of shape (literally) in “The Muppets Take Manhattan” (1984). She appeared in two more films in the 1980s before her movie career went dormant.
But beginning in 2010 — when she was in her 70s — she did several more films, including “A Short History of Decay” (2014), as a Floridian who has Alzheimer’s disease; “How to Be a Latin Lover” (2017), in which Rob Lowe played her love interest; and “Nancy Drew and the Hidden Staircase” (2019), as Aunt Flora, who believes her Victorian mansion is haunted.
New York theater was central to Ms. Lavin’s career before and after “Alice.” Her early stage work included the musical comedy “It’s a Bird … It’s a Plane … It’s Superman” (1966), Carl Reiner’s farce “Something Different” (1967) and “Paul Sills’ Story Theater” (1970), all on Broadway; “Little Murders” (1969) at Circle in the Square; and a Shakespeare in the Park production of “The Comedy of Errors” (1975).
After her “Broadway Bound” Tony, she received four more nominations: for “The Diary of Anne Frank” (1998), Charles Busch’s “The Tale of the Allergist’s Wife” (2000), Donald Margulies’s “Collected Stories” (2010) and Nicky Silver’s “The Lyons” (2012). She was also nominated for “Last of the Red Hot Lovers.”
Had she not been a replacement for the original actresses, she might have been honored for “The Sisters Rosensweig” (in which she replaced Madeline Kahn) and “Gypsy” (replacing Tyne Daly) as well. Her final Broadway appearance was in “Our Mother’s Brief Affair” (2016), about a woman revealing a Cold War secret on her deathbed.
Ms. Lavin hardly abandoned the small screen, though. In addition to television movies and prime time guest roles, she was part of the cast of at least four short-lived series: “Room for Two” (1992-93); “Conrad Bloom” (1998); “Sean Saves the World” (2013-14), with Sean Hayes; and “9JKL” (2017-18), with Elliott Gould.
In 2019 she played a Meals on Wheels client who becomes one of the undead in five episodes of “Santa Clarita Diet” and Hank Azaria’s estranged mother, Lorraine, on an episode of “Brockmire.” This year, she appeared in three episodes of the Netflix dark comedy “No Good Deed” as Phyllis, a nosy neighbor.
Ms. Lavin married three times. Her first husband was the actor Ron Leibman (1969-81), whom she met when they starred in John Guare’s Broadway comedy “Cop-Out.” Her second was Kip Niven (1982-92), also an actor. Both those marriages ended in divorce. She and Steve Bakunas, an actor, artist and musician, married in 2005 and established the Red Barn Theater in Wilmington, N.C., before returning to New York.
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