Linda Lavin obituary

“I used to be sad, I used to be shy,” sang Linda Lavin, who has died aged 87, in the theme song of the US television sitcom Alice, in which she played the eponymous lead. The show ran from 1976 until 1985, becoming the longest-running sitcom starring a woman (eventually Roseanne would overtake it), and was based on Martin Scorsese’s 1974 film Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, which had starred Ellen Burstyn as Alice. On TV, Lavin played the widowed mother who leaves New Jersey with her son intending to move to California and resume her youthful dream of a singing career. But her car breaks down in Phoenix, Arizona, and she takes a temporary job at Mel’s Diner, which becomes the setting for a comedic family group including grouchy Mel and two waitresses, sassy Flo and ditzy Vera.

Audiences embraced Alice’s struggle to overcome a single mother’s sadness and shyness. It was a part made for Lavin’s experience in theatre, where she began in vivacious musical comedy, and moved to serious straight acting. Alice became iconic to working women in this era of nascent feminism, and won Lavin an Emmy nomination and two Golden Globe awards. Yet when the show ended after 202 episodes, Lavin returned to Broadway to resume her career on stage.

She began acting at the age of five. Lavin was born in Portland, Maine. Her father, David, was a businessman; her mother, Lucille (nee Porter), had, like Alice, abandoned her youthful promise as an opera singer. Linda was educated at Portland’s progressive Wayneflete school (at the time all girls), then enrolled at the College of William and Mary, Virginia, whose theatre programme was one of the best in the US. It was also year-round; she played summer stock at the college’s theatre, and by the time she graduated already had an Equity card.

Lavin joined the Paul Sills’ Compass Players, America’s first improvisational theatre group, whose alumni included Mike Nichols, Elaine May, Jerry Stiller, Anne Meara, Valerie Harper and Ron Leibman. She moved to New York, where her first roommate was Olympia Dukakis, and made her off-Broadway debut in the 1960 musical Oh, Kay!

She debuted on Broadway two years later, in Hal Prince’s musical A Family Affair, but her impact grew off-Broadway. In 1966, her performance of Steven Sondheim’s song The Boy From ... was a highlight of The Mad Show (a revue based on Mad magazine), while on Broadway she had another show-stealing song moment with You’ve Got Possibilities in It’s a Bird … It’s a Plane … It’s Superman. Three years later she won an Outer Critics Circle award for best performance for Little Murders, written by Jules Feiffer and directed by Alan Arkin, while on Broadway she was nominated for a Tony in Neil Simon’s Last of the Red Hot Lovers. Also in 1969, she and Leibman played together in John Guare’s two-hander Cop Out; later that year they married and moved to Los Angeles.

Lavin had appeared in the daytime soap opera The Doctors, and one episode of the prime time series The Nurses, as well as in the 1967 TV movie version of Damn Yankees!. Then, after one guest slot on the Mary Tyler Moore spin-off, Rhoda, in 1974, she had a recurring role as a detective in the cop comedy Barney Miller, before landing Alice.

She and Leibman divorced in 1981; she married the actor Kip Nevin in 1982.

Shortly after returning to Broadway in 1987, she won a Tony in Simon’s Broadway Bound, the last of his Eugene trilogy, giving a powerful performance as Eugene’s mother Kate, in postwar Brooklyn, losing her husband to adultery and her children to careers.

She interrupted her stage career for the occasional appearance on screen, including a memorable cameo in The Muppets Take Manhattan, as the doctor who treats Kermit the Frog’s amnesia by twisting him like a pretzel, and tells him that he is actually “Enrico Tortellini of Passaic, New Jersey”.

After she and Niven divorced in 1992 her career blossomed: an off-Broadway Obie award, more Tony nominations for The Diary of Anne Frank (1998) and The Tale of the Allergist’s Wife (2000), and successes in roles where she replaced the original star, including Gypsy (for Tyne Daly) and The Sisters Rosenweig (for Madeline Kahn).

In 2005 Lavin married the actor, artist and musician Steve Bakunas, with whom she established the Red Barn theatre in Wilmington, North Carolina, along with an arts and education foundation. Bakunas sometimes joined her accompanist Billy Stritch on Lavin’s cabaret tours. She lost no energy in her later years; she was the best thing on stage in Our Mother’s Brief Affair (2016) and her ability to elevate any role saw her in demand on the small screen in shows including Sean Saves the World, 9JKL (with Elliott Gould), B Positive, Yvette Slosch, Agent, Santa Clarita Diet (as a zombie) and, in 2024, in three episodes of No Good Deed.

She died weeks after being diagnosed with lung cancer, having already taped most of the first season of Mid-Century Modern, a remake of The Golden Girls with three gay men, which will be seen later this year; she played Nathan Lane’s mother.

Lavin is survived by her husband.

• Linda Lavin, actor, born 15 October 1937; died 29 December 2024