Remembering Linda Lavin: Celebrating the Legacy of a Timeless Talent
Linda Lavin, a Tony Award-winning actress who made her Broadway debut in the mid-70s after starring as Alice Hyatt, a waitress and single mother, on TV for five years, passed on Sunday at her home in Los Angeles. She was 87.
Her death was confirmed by Michael Gagliardo, a spokesman who said the cause was complications that emanated from lung cancer.
To most American television viewers, Ms. Lavin was a virtual unknown at the time when “Alice,” a comedy based on Martin Scorsese’s 1974 drama film “Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore” with Ellen Burstyn as the leading actress, premiered. Working as a widowed mother,
who travels to Los Angeles to become a singer, being a waitress in Mel’s Diner because of the car breakdown, Ms. Lavin was not a renowned actress. But to a theatre audience, especially an NYC one, she was not a complete unknown; in fact she had acted in eight Broadway plays between 1962 and 1973 including the title role in Neil Simon’s ‘The Last of the Red Hot Lovers’ in 1969.
“Alice” was aired from 1976 to 1985, thanks to which Ms. Lavin received two Golden Globe Awards and her show was nominated for an Emmy. After the show, she returned to her first love with New York stage and in 1987 won the Tony Award for the 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.”
Frank Rich aptly described the character in his The New York Times play review, saying that what the actress offered the audience, and the Broadway trad John Spencer wrote that ‘the characterization I turned out was a remarkable achievement: a Jewish mother who re-defined the Jewish mother stereotype on Broadway even as she made grown men gag over her concern with her children’s health or worrying if the pot roast is bubbling on the stove but succeeds at the same. That is from Mr. Rich who referred to Kate as “a woman who takes ‘her own quiet pleasure’ in a world that goes no farther than her subway line.”