NEW YORK — Linda Lavin, the Tony Award-winning stage actress who became a working class icon as a paper hat-wearing waitress in the TV sitcom “Alice,” has died. He was 87 years old.
Lavin died Sunday in Los Angeles of complications from recently diagnosed lung cancer, his representative, Bill Veloric, told The Associated Press in an email.
After 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 Academy Award for playing the title waitress.
The title was shortened to “Alice,” and Lavin became a role model for working moms like Alice Hyatt, a widowed mother with a 12-year-old son working at a diner outside Phoenix. The show, featuring Lavigne singing “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 Flo the waitress and Vic Tayback as the scheming owner and head chef of Mel’s Diner.
The series bounced around the CBS schedule during its first two seasons, but it was a hit that reached “All in the Family” on Sunday nights in October 1977. It remained in the top 10 primetime series for four of the next five seasons. Variety magazine named it one of the best work comedies of all time.
Lavin soon won a Tony Award for Best Actor in Neil Simon’s “Broadway Bound” in 1987.
As recently as this month he was working on promoting a new Netflix series in which he appears, “No Good Deed,” and filming an upcoming Hulu series, “Mid-Century Modern.” periodfirst reported his death.
Lavin grew up in Portland, Maine, and moved to New York after graduating from the University of William and Mary. He sang in discotheques and show bands.
Iconic producer and director Hal Prince gave Lavin his first big break while directing the Broadway musical “It’s a Bird… It’s a Plane… It’s Superman.” Simon’s “Last of the Red Hot Lovers” earned him a Tony nomination in 1969, and 18 years later, he won 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 starred in Paul Rudnick’s comedy “The New Century,” a concert show called “Songs.” & Confessions of a One-Time Waitress” and Donald Margulies’ “Collected Stories” earned him a Tony nomination.
The AP’s Michael Kuchwara praised Lavin in Collected Stories, writing that she “gives one of those rich, nuanced performances, capturing the woman’s intellectual strength, her wry sense of humor, and her growing physical vulnerability with startling fidelity. And Lavin’s sense of timing is superb, delivering a joke or sharply dissecting his protégé’s work.”
Lavin received renewed attention in his 70s, earning a Tony nomination for Nicky Silver’s “The Lyons.” He also starred in revivals of “Other Desert Cities” and “Follies” before transferring to Broadway.
The AP spoke again of Lavin in “The Lyons,” calling it “absolutely amazing as Rita Lyons, a nag of a mother with strong convictions and a set of eyes, a suffocating matriarch who keeps everyone at arm’s length.” .
He also appeared in the film “Wanderlust” with Jennifer Aniston and Paul Rudd, and released his first CD, “Possibilities”. She played the role of Jennifer Lopez’s grandmother in “The Back-Up Plan”.
Asked for guidance from future actors, Lavin emphasized one thing. “I say what happened to me brings work. As long as it wasn’t morally reprehensible to me, I did it,” he told the AP in 2011.
She and Steve Bakunas, an artist, musician and her third husband, converted an old automotive garage into the 50-seat Red Barn Studio Theater in Wilmington, North Carolina.
It opened in 2007 and their productions include 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” (Lavin). He also starred on Broadway, earning a Tony nomination.
He returned to television in 2013 in “Sean Saves the World,” “Will & Grace’s” Sean Hayes, the show ran for one season. Lavin also made appearances on “Mom” and “9JKL.”
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AP Entertainment writer Andrew Dalton contributed from Los Angeles.
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Mark Kennedy is here http://twitter.com/KennedyTwits.
