Actress Linda Lavin, from TV’s ‘Alice’, dies aged 87 of complications from cancer

Linda Lavin, a Tony Award-winning stage actress who became a working-class icon as a paper hat-wearing waitress on the television sitcom “Alice,” has died. She was 87.

Lavin died in Los Angeles on Sunday of complications from newly diagnosed lung cancer, her representative, Bill Veloric, told The Associated Press in an email.

A success on Broadway, Lavin tried his luck in Hollywood in the mid-1970s. She was tapped to star in a new CBS sitcom based on “Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore,” the Martin Scorsese-directed film that won Ellen Burstyn an Oscar for playing the title waitress.

The title was shortened to “Alice,” and Lavin became a role model for working mothers like Alice Hyatt, a widow with a 12-year-old son who works in a roadside diner outside Phoenix. The show, in which Lavin sang the theme song “There’s a New Girl in Town,” ran from 1976 to 1985.

The show made “Kiss my grits” a catchphrase and starred Polly Holliday as waitress Flo and Vic Tayback as the gruff owner and head chef of Mel’s Diner.

The series bounced around the CBS schedule during its first two seasons, but became a hit that led to “All in the Family” on Sunday nights in October 1977. It was among primetime’s top 10 series for four of the next five seasons . Variety magazine listed it among the best workplace comedies of all time.

Lavin soon won a Tony for Best Actress in a Play for Neil Simon’s “Broadway Bound” in 1987.

As recently as this month, she was working to promote a new Netflix series in which she stars, “No Good Deed,” and filming an upcoming Hulu series, “Mid-Century Modern,” according to Deadline, which first reported on her death.

Lavin grew up in Portland, Maine, and moved to New York City after graduating from the College of William and Mary. She sang in nightclubs and in ensembles of shows.

Iconic producer and director Hal Prince gave Lavin her first big break while directing the Broadway musical “It’s a Bird … It’s a Plane … It’s Superman.” She went on to earn a Tony nomination in Simon’s “Last of the Red Hot Lovers” in 1969 before winning 18 years later for another Simon play, “Broadway Bound.”

In the mid-1970s, Lavin moved to Los Angeles. She had a recurring role on “Barney Miller” and in 1976 was cast in a new CBS sitcom based on Ellen Burstyn’s Oscar-winning waitress comedy-drama, “Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore.”

Back on Broadway, Lavin later starred in Paul Rudnick’s comedy “The New Century,” had a concert show called “Songs & Confessions of a One-Time Waitress” and earned a Tony nomination in Donald Margulies’ “Collected Stories.”

Michael Kuchwara of AP gave Lavin a rave in “Collected Stories”, writing that she “gives one of those complete, nuanced performances that captures the woman’s intellectual agency, her wry sense of humor and her increasing physical frailty with astonishing fidelity . And Lavin’s sense of timing is superb, whether she’s delivering a joke or sharply dissecting her protégé’s work.”

Lavin enjoyed a burst of renewed attention in his 70s, earning a Tony nomination for Nicky Silver’s “The Lyons.” She also appeared in “Other Desert Cities” and a revival of “Follies” before they moved to Broadway.

The AP again raved about Lavin in “The Lyons,” calling her “an absolute marvel to watch as Rita Lyons, a grumpy mother with a collection of fixed beliefs and eye rolls, a matriarch who both suffocates and keeps everyone in hand. length.”

She also appeared in the film “Wanderlust” with Jennifer Aniston and Paul Rudd and released her first CD, “Possibilities”. She played Jennifer Lopez’s grandmother in “The Back-Up Plan”.

When asked about guidance from aspiring actors, Lavin emphasized one thing. “I say what happened to me was that work begets work. As long as it wasn’t morally reprehensible to me, I did it,” she told the AP in 2011.

She and Steve Bakunas, an artist, musician and her third husband, converted an old car garage into the 50-seat Red Barn Studio Theater in Wilmington, North Carolina.

It opened in 2007 and their productions include “Doubt” by John Patrick Shanley, “Glengarry Glen Ross” by David Mamet, “Rabbit Hole” by David Lindsay-Abaire and “The Tale of the Allergist’s Wife” by Charles Busch, in which Lavin also appeared on Broadway and received a Tony nomination.

She returned to television in 2013 in “Sean Saves the World,” starring “Will & Grace’s” Sean Hayes, a show that lasted one season. Lavin also appeared in “Mom” and “9JKL.”