Veteran Sitcom, Broadway Star Dies ‘Unexpectedly'

Legendary sitcom star and Broadway performer Linda Lavin has died “unexpectedly” at 87, her representatives confirmed to The Hollywood Reporter. The veteran actor, who was also well-known for her tireless advocacy for women’s rights, passed away due to complications from recently-diagnosed lung cancer.

Lavin broke out as a Broadway performer, first as a chorus member and then as a leading actor. For her turn in Neil Simon’s 1970 farce The Last of the Red Hot Lovers, she received her first of six career Tony nominations; she would win once, in 1987, for her role as Kate in Broadway Bound. Lavin made an impression on television audiences with a recurring role as hard-boiled detective Janet Wentworth in The Barney Miller Show before she was tapped to lead Alice, which remains one of her most well-remembered roles.

The series, which ran for nine seasons, was loosely adapted from Martin Scorsese’s Oscar-winning melodrama Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore. Refashioned as an ensemble sitcom, the series followed Lavin as the widowed title character who relocates to Arizona with her young son and finds work in a diner. 

The show marked a shift in Lavin’s professional career as well as her personal life, as playing the determined single mother pushed her headlong into the women’s rights movement. Lavin would often turn up to marches, such as an appearance in front of the National Commission of Working Women, wearing her Alice uniform so that “she would speak for me.”

“I knew it behooved me to learn about single mothers and working women,” Lavin said in a 2012 interview. “So I went to Gloria Steinem, whom I had met briefly, and she hooked me up with writers and columnists and newspeople who were writing about working women,” she continued. “I learned that Alice represented 80 percent of all the women who work in this country who were still struggling at 69 cents to the dollar that men were making for the same quality of work. Suddenly, I had a rhetoric, I had a commitment.”

Lavin continued acting up until her death with roles on CBS’s Elsbeth and Netflix’s Santa Clarita Diet as well as the streamer’s No Good Deed, which premiered earlier this month. She also appeared in the movies The Intern (2015); Nancy Drew and the Hidden Staircase (2019); and in Being the Ricardos (2021), playing I Love Lucy writer Madelyn Pugh. At the time of her death, she was starring in Hulu's comedy series Mid-Century Modern.

Lavin is survived by her husband of nearly 20 years, musician Steve Bakunas, whom she wed in 2005.