The Tony Award-winning stage actress Linda Lavin, who rose to fame as a working-class icon while playing a waitress in a paper hat on the television sitcom Alice, passed away. She was eighty-seven.
According to an email forwarded to The Associated Press by her representative, Bill Veloric, Lavin passed away in Los Angeles on Sunday due to complications from newly diagnosed lung cancer.
In the middle of the 1970s, Lavin, a Broadway success, made an attempt at Hollywood. Based on the Martin Scorsese-directed movie Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, in which Ellen Burstyn won an Oscar for her portrayal of the title waitress, she was selected to star in a new CBS sitcom.
In the abbreviated title, Alice and Lavin, a widowed mother with a 12-year-old boy who works in a roadside cafe outside of Phoenix, become role models for working mothers. Lavin performed the theme song, “There’s a New Girl in Town,” during the 1976–1985 run of the show.
Kiss my grits became a catchphrase thanks to the sitcom, which also starred Vic Tayback as the stern owner and head chef of Mel’s Diner and Polly Holliday as waitress Flo.
During its first two seasons, the show shifted around on the CBS schedule, but it was a hit before All in the Family premiered on Sunday nights in October 1977. For four of the following five seasons, it was in the top 10 primetime programs. It was named one of the greatest workplace comedy of all time by Variety magazine.
Soon after, in 1987, Lavin won a Tony Award for outstanding actress in a play for Broadway Bound, written by Neil Simon.
According to Deadline, which broke the news of her passing, she was working as recently as this month to promote a new Netflix series called No Good Deed, in which she stars, and to film a new Hulu series called Mid-Century Modern.
After graduating from the College of William and Mary, Lavin, who was born and raised in Portland, Maine, relocated to New York City. She performed in both group shows and nightclubs.
When directing the Broadway musical, legendary producer and director Hal Prince handed Lavin her first significant break. It’s an airplane… It’s a bird… Superman is here. In 1969, she received a Tony nomination for Simon’s Last of the Red Hot Lovers, and eighteen years later, she won for Broadway Bound, another Simon piece.
Lavin relocated to Los Angeles in the middle of the 1970s. In 1976, she was selected to star in a new CBS sitcom based on Ellen Burstyn’s Oscar-winning waitress comedy-drama, Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, after having a recurrent part on Barney Miller.
After returning to Broadway, Lavin starred in Paul Rudnick’s comedy The New Century, performed in Songs & Confessions of a One-Time Waitress, and was nominated for a Tony Award for Donald Margulies’ Collected Stories.
In Collected Stories, Michael Kuchwara of the AP praised Lavin, stating that she delivers one of those comprehensive, subtle performances that remarkably faithfully capture the woman’s growing physical weakness, sardonic sense of humor, and intellectual vitality. Additionally, Lavin has excellent timing, whether she’s cracking a joke or critiquing her protégé’s work.
In her seventies, Lavin enjoyed a surge of newfound fame after receiving a Tony nomination for Nicky Silver’s The Lyons. Before they moved to Broadway, she also starred in a revival of Follies and Other Desert Cities.
Lavin was praised by the AP once more for her role as Rita Lyons in The Lyons, describing her as a matriarch who is oppressive and keeping everyone at a distance. She is a nag of a mother with a collection of strong beliefs and eye rolls.
She also published her debut CD, Possibilities, and costarred with Paul Rudd and Jennifer Aniston in the movie Wanderlust. In The Back-Up Plan, she portrayed Jennifer Lopez’s grandmother.
When questioned about advice for aspiring performers, Lavin emphasized one point. I would say that my experience was that work brings work. “I did it as long as it wasn’t morally repugnant to me,” she told the AP in 2011.
In Wilmington, North Carolina, she and her third husband, musician and artist Steve Bakunas, transformed an old car garage into the 50-seat Red Barn Studio Theatre.
It debuted in 2007, and among its productions are John Patrick Shanley’s Doubt, David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross, David Lindsay-Abaire’s Rabbit Hole, and Charles Busch’s The Tale of the Allergist’s Wife, in which Lavin also starred on Broadway and received a Tony nomination.
In 2013, she made a comeback to television with Sean Saves the World, a one-season series starring Sean Hayes from Will & Grace. Lavin appeared on Mom and 9JKL as well.
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