Linda Lavin, Broadway Actress and Star of TV Sitcom ‘Alice,’ Dies at 87

Arts|Linda Lavin, Broadway Actress and Star of TV Sitcom ‘Alice,’ Dies at 87

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.

Michael Gagliardo, a representative, said the cause was complications of 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.