“I have a very rich and full life and I’m happy to show up”: Linda Lavin, 1937-2024

The first thing I think of is that smile she had.

Linda Lavin, who died of lung cancer yesterday at 87, was known for many things: as our own E. Rose Nelson noted for Celebrating the Living, she often played a woman fighting for her place in the world, whether it was as the plucky Detective Janice Wentworth in Barney Miller or Mama Rose trying to live through her children in Gypsy. For almost a decade, she was the star of Alice, a workplace sitcom more or less based on Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, which is where I remember her best. She played a struggling single mom with dreams of going to Nashville, but what I mostly remember from the show is her warmth.

But Lavin was more versatile than that: the tough matriarch in Neil Simon’s Broadway Bound, reporter Gloria in the filmed version of Damn Yankees!, a lovestruck reporter singing the “one memorable song” in the infamous Broadway flop It’s a Bird…It’s a Plane…It’s Superman.

She did have a few starring roles in film, but it was television and theater where she really shone, earning multiple theatrical awards, including the Tony for Broadway Bound, two Golden Globes as Alice, and a nomination each for the Daytime and Primetime Emmys. She doesn’t appear to have ever tried for an EGOT, and I’m not sure it would have suited her. She’s delightful in The Muppets Take Manhattan, but the intimacy of theater and the small screen was where she really belonged. She was a friend, or a mother, or a girl with grit and ambition, not a larger-than-life movie star. (Perhaps that’s why she got mixed reviews as Mama Rose, a woman who wants to be a big star but knows she’ll never get there.)

She certainly seems to have been fun to work with, as she worked regularly on both stage and the small screen after Alice ended, a rarity after an actress passes “a certain age.” Emily Deschanel said she emailed with bone questions (“she even sent me x-rays”) after her guest appearance on Bones. She had recurring roles in Santa Clarita Diet and B Positive, was tapped as Sean Hayes’ co-star in Sean Saves the World, and was in this year’s Netflix limited series No Good Deed. In an interview, she said she still enjoyed doing theater, but wasn’t up to long runs any more — pretty understandable for a woman in her eighties. She was working on the upcoming Mid-Century Modern with Matt Bomer and Nathan Lane just weeks before her death; “She made our days better,” her co-stars said in a joint statement. 

Onscreen, she was fun, too — that smile of hers was characteristic of the warm charisma that was present in her performances. It’s no wonder Americans invited her into their homes again and again.

She had no children, but was an active stepmother and grandmother. She married three times, and the third time really was the charm; she’s survived by that husband, artist and musician Steve Bakunas. They settled in Wilmington, North Carolina for a while, and even renovated a garage into a community theater together. She also directed there (she directed some episodes of Alice as well, and an afterschool special in 1990).

Overall, she seems to have lived the life she wanted to live, and she was proud of the work she’d done (as she should have been). She described her life as “wonderful” to People earlier this month. From the new girl in town to the “critical, smothering and amoral” character she was to play in Mid-Century Modern, viewers were always happy to have her stay a while.

Here’s Lavin, in her own words, on the cultural impact of Alice, and why she chose to dress as the character when she advocated for the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment.

People has a rather wonderful obituary as well, from which I’ve taken the title quote.

And YouTube just served up Matt Baume’s video on Alice and “The Gayest Week in TV History.” Matt is always worth watching.