Tony-Winning Linda Lavin, The Star Of Sitcom ‘Alice,’ Dead At 87
HuffPost
Lavin was working as recently as this month promoting a new Netflix series in which she appears, “No Good Deed."
NEW YORK (AP) — Linda Lavin, a Tony Award-winning stage actor who became a working class icon as a paper-hat wearing waitress on the TV sitcom “Alice,” has died. She was 87.
Lavin died in Los Angeles on Sunday of complications from recently discovered lung cancer, her representative, Bill Veloric, told The Associated Press in an email.
A success on Broadway, Lavin tried her luck in Hollywood in the mid-1970s.
She was chosen 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 become a role model for working moms as Alice Hyatt, a widowed mother with a 12-year-old son working in a roadside diner outside Phoenix. The show, with Lavin singing the theme song “There’s a New Girl in Town,” ran from 1976 to 1985.
