Linda Lavin, the Tony-winning actress who spent nine seasons serving up meals with a side order of sass as the waitress Alice Hyatt on the hit CBS sitcom Alice, died Sunday. She was 87.
Lavin died unexpectedly in Los Angeles of complications from recently discovered lung cancer, her rep told The Hollywood Reporter.
Hal Prince gave Lavin her first big break, pulling her out of the chorus and giving her a speaking part on Broadway in 1962, and she worked twice with Neil Simon, earning the first of her six career Tony nominations for playing the sexpot Elaine in 1970’s Last of the Red Hot Lovers and then winning in 1987 for her turn as the strong-willed Kate in Broadway Bound.
A native of Maine, Lavin had recurred as feisty Det. Janice Wentworth on the first two seasons of ABC’s Barney Miller when she was hired in 1976 to topline Alice, created by Robert Getchell. The show was based on the Warner Bros. movie Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1974), written by Getchell, directed by Martin Scorsese and starring Ellen Burstyn in an Oscar-winning performance.
The plucky Alice is a recently widowed mom with a young son (Philip McKeon on the series) who struggles to make ends meet as she holds down a job at Mel’s Diner, a greasy spoon on the outskirts of Phoenix.
Starring on Alice pulled her right into the women’s movement, she recalled in a 2012 interview. “I knew it behooved me to learn about single mothers and working women,” she said. “So I went to Gloria Steinem, whom I had met briefly, and she hooked me up with writers and columnists and newspeople who were writing about working women.
“I learned that Alice represented 80 percent of all the women who work in this country who were still struggling at 69 cents to the dollar that men were making for the same quality of work. Suddenly, I had a rhetoric, I had a commitment.”
Lavin marched in support of the Equal Rights Amendment and was invited to join the National Commission on Working Women. She often delivered speeches wearing her Alice waitress uniform “so she would speak for me.”
The actress told Charlie Rose in 1992 that she heard from women “by the thousands. [They were saying,] thank you, thank you for showing me ‘me,’ thank you for being real, thank you for showing what the issues are, thank you for giving me hope, thank you for showing me that if Alice can do it, I can do it.”
Lavin earned one Emmy nomination and two Golden Globes for her work on the series, which was ranked in the top 10 in the ratings in its fourth, fifth and sixth seasons.
After nearly 13 years away, Lavin made a triumphant return to the Great White Way with her portrayal of an abandoned wife and mother of Eugene (Jonathan Silverman) and Stanley (Jason Alexander) in Broadway Bound.
“Kate is 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,” Frank Rich wrote in his review for The New York Times. “One only wishes that Ms. Lavin, whose touching performance is of the same high integrity as the writing, could stay in the role forever.”
Linda Lavin with Jonathan Silverman in Neil Simon’s ‘Broadway Bound.’
Courtesy of Photofest
“I’m grateful to Neil Simon for the insight of his bountiful writing, which gets me in touch with all the women I come from, all the women in me, so that I am so fulfilled to play such a wonderful character,” she said in her Tony acceptance speech.
Lavin was born on Oct. 15, 1937, in Portland, Maine. Her mother, Lucille, was a coloratura soprano and radio personality who sang with Paul Whiteman’s band, and her father, David, owned a furniture business.
She always wanted to be an actress and graduated from the College of William & Mary as a theater arts major in 1959. She moved to New York a few months later and appeared in an off-Broadway revival of George and Ira Gershwin’s Oh, Kay!
Lavin was in the chorus out of town in Philadelphia in a troubled show called A Family Affair when “Hal Prince walked in,” she recalled in a 2018 interview with Broadway World. “I’d never met him before, dynamo of a man … [he] pointed at me and said, ‘You’re terrific, I’ll see you later,’ and the next day he was introduced as our new director and I got three speaking parts. At that time, you got $5 apiece for each speaking part. So, I was now an actor.”
She made it to Broadway with the musical comedy, and after appearing in other plays including The Riot Act, Wet Paint, The Game Is Up and Hotel Passionato, was hired by Prince again in 1966. She played Sydney, the Girl Friday of a Daily Planet columnist (Jack Cassidy), in It’s a Bird … It’s a Plane … It’s Superman and sang about her crush on Clark Kent in “You’ve Got Possibilities, ” written by Charles Strouse and Lee Adams.
Lavin also performed Stephen Sondheim‘s “The Boy From …” in The Mad Show and toured with Van Johnson in On a Clear Day You Can See Forever before returning to Broadway in 1967 to star in the Carl Reiner comedy Something Different.
In 1969, she sparkled as Patsy opposite Fred Willard in the acclaimed Jules Feiffer black comedy Little Murders, directed by Alan Arkin. She won an Outer Critics Circle Award for her stint as a woman randomly shot on her wedding day but left to star with new husband Ron Leibman in the Broadway comedy Cop-Out, which lasted eight performances.
After Last of the Red Hot Lovers, she departed for Hollywood. In 1974, she attended the wedding shower of Valerie Harper‘s character on an episode of Rhoda and appeared in the acclaimed Dick Van Dyke telefilm The Morning After.
On Alice, Lavin enjoyed great camaraderie with her co-stars Vic Tayback, Polly Holliday and Beth Howland, directed 10 episodes and performed the theme song, “There’s a New Girl in Town.” The series wrapped in March 1985 with her character getting a recording contract and moving to Nashville with her boyfriend, country singer Travis Marsh (played by her second husband, Kip Niven).
During Alice‘s run, she also starred in several telefilms, including The $5.20 an Hour Dream, in which she played a factory worker, and hosted her own 1980 holiday-season special, Linda in Wonderland.
Her other starring efforts on series TV — all short-lived — included 1992-93’s Room for Two, with Patricia Heaton as her daughter; 1998’s Conrad Bloom; and 2013-14’s Sean Saves the World; and 2017-18’s 9JKL.
She showed up on Netflix’s Santa Clarita Diet and IFC’s Brockmire, too; had more recent turns on CBS’ B Positive and Elsbeth and Netflix’s No Good Deed (she attended its premiere in Hollywood on Dec. 4); and was co-starring on the Hulu comedy Mid-Century Modern at the time of her death.
“Working with Linda was one of the highlights of our careers,” Mid-Century Modern principals David Kohan, Max Mutchnick and Jimmy Burrows said in a statement. “She was a magnificent actress, singer, musician, and a heat-seeking missile with a joke. But more significantly, she was a beautiful soul. Deep, joyful, generous and loving. She made our days better. The entire staff and crew will miss her beyond measure. We are better for having known her.”
Lavin also garnered Tony noms in 1998, 2001, 2010 and 2012 for her turns in The Diary of Anne Frank, The Tale of the Allergist’s Wife, Collected Stories and The Lyons, respectively, and she played Carol Burnett’s grandmother in 2002-03 in Hollywood Arms, directed by Prince, who introduced her as she was inducted into the Theatre Hall of Fame in 2011.
On the big screen, Lavin appeared in such films as The Muppets Take Manhattan (1984), See You in the Morning (1989), I Want to Go Home (1989), Wanderlust (2012), The Intern (2015), How to Be a Latin Lover (2017), Nancy Drew and the Hidden Staircase (2019) and, as an older version of I Love Lucy writer Madelyn Pugh, in Being the Ricardos.
Survivors include her third husband, drummer and artist Steve Bakunas, who was 20 years her junior. They married in 2005 and ran the Red Barn Studio Theater in Wilmington, North Carolina; he also played drums in her cabaret act and on her 2011 album of show tunes and jazz standards, Possibilities.
She was married to Leibman from 1969-80 and to Niven from 1982-92. Her divorce from the latter was especially contentious; he was seeking $6 million in money and property from her, but a judge awarded him just $675,000 after a six-month trial.
Duane Byrge contributed to this report.
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