Tony-winning and two-time Emmy-nominated stage, TV and screen actress Linda Lavin passed away on Sunday in Los Angeles from complications from lung cancer. She was 87. Best known for her long-running starring role as a waitress and single mother in the popular CBS sitcom Alice (1976-1985), she also took home a Best Actress Tony Award for her role in the play Broadway Bound.
Created by Robert Getchell, Alice was based on the 1974 film Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore. In the series, Lavin played a widow who moves with her young son to start life over again, and finds a job working as a paper-hat-wearing waitress in a roadside diner in Phoenix, Arizona. The show earned the actress two Golden Globe Awards and an Emmy nomination. After the show ended, Lavin returned to the stage and won the Tony for Neil Simon’s Broadway Bound.
Lavin was born on Oct. 15, 1937, in Portland, Maine, the second child of a businessman, and a former soprano. In the late 1950s, she became a member of the improv group Compass Players. She made her Broadway in the musical A Family Affair, which was followed by roles in the soap opera The Doctors and a recurring role as a police detective in Barney Miller.
She made her feature film debut in the 1984 movie, The Muppets Take Manhattan. She played a doctor who twists Kermit the Frog out of shape in the popular feature directed by Frank Oz. She also appeared as a guest on The Muppet Show(Episode 406) in 1979.
In animation, she voiced Helen Kellerman and Gertie Lombard, two guest characters in Fox TV’s award-winning series Bob’s Burgers (In the episodes “It Snakes a Village” and “Radio No You Didn’t”). (Gertie is the mother of Alice Lombard and grandmother of Lily Lombard, who’s Bob Belcher’s mom.) Lavin also voiced Mother Vulture in Cartoon Network’s Courage the Cowardly Dog in 2002.
