Linda Lavin, the Tony-winning actress who starred in the landmark sitcom Alice, has died at 87.

Linda Lavin, Tony Award-winning actress who became a working-class icon as a paper-hat waitress on a TV sitcom Alicedied. She was 87 years old.

Lavin died Sunday in Los Angeles of complications from recently diagnosed lung cancer, her representative, Bill Veloric, told The Associated Press in an email.

Successful on Broadway, Lavin tried her luck in Hollywood in the mid-1970s. She has been cast as the lead in a new CBS sitcom based on Alice doesn’t live here anymorea film directed by Martin Scorsese that brought Ellen Burstyn an Oscar for the role of the main waitress.

The title is shortened to Alice and Lavin became a role model for working moms as Alice Hyatt, a widowed mother with a 12-year-old son who works at a roadside diner near Phoenix. The play, with Lavina singing the theme song There’s a new girl in townit lasted from 1976 to 1985.

The series turned “Kiss My Grit” into a catchphrase and starred Polly Holliday as Flo the waitress and Vic Tayback as the gruff owner and head chef of Mel’s Diner. The series bounced around the CBS schedule during its first two seasons, but became a hit leading to Everyone in the family on Sunday nights in October 1977. It was a top 10 primetime series for four of the next five seasons. Variety magazine named it one of the best workplace comedies of all time.

Lavin soon won the Tony for Best Actress in a Play for Neil Simon Road to Broadway 1987, which also earned her Drama Desk, Outer Critics and Helen Hayes awards.

“She was a great actress with a generous heart,” said Actors Equity at X. The group honored her with the 2023 Richard Seff Award — given to veterans in supporting roles — for her work in the Noah Diaz film You will get sick.

As recently as this month, she was working to promote a new Netflix series in which she appears, There is no good deedand filming the upcoming Hulu series, Mid-century modern, according to Rokwho first reported her death. She also appeared in 2024 as a guest star in Elsbethspinoff of A good woman.

Lavin grew up in Portland, Maine, and moved to New York after graduating from the College of William and Mary. She sang in nightclubs and in ensembles.

Iconic producer and director Hal Prince gave Lava her first big break when he directed a Broadway musical It’s a bird … It’s a plane … It’s Superman. She received a Tony nomination for Simon Last of the Red Hot Lovers in 1969 before winning 18 years later for Simon’s second play, Road to Broadway.

In the mid-1970s, Lavin moved to Los Angeles. She had a recurring role Barney Miller and in 1976 he was cast as the lead in a new CBS sitcom based on Ellen Burstyn’s Academy Award-winning comedy-drama about Waitress, Alice doesn’t live here anymore.

Returning to Broadway, Lavin later starred in a Paul Rudnick comedy New centuryshe had a concert performance called Songs and confessions of a former waitress and earned a Tony nomination in the Donald Margulies film Collected stories.

“A star in every medium, but a pure theatrical genius. Blissfully funny, deeply emotional, and the audience adored her. She never disappointed: I worked with her, and just watching her rehearse and build a performance was an education and the greatest joy,” Rudnick wrote on X.

AP’s Michael Kuchwara gave Lava a rave Collected storieswriting that she “gives one of those whole, nuanced performances, capturing the woman’s intellectual strength, her wry sense of humor, and her increasing physical frailty with startling fidelity. And Lavigne’s sense of timing is superb, whether delivering a joke or scathingly dissecting her work wards.”

Lavin enjoyed a surge of renewed attention in her 70s, earning a Tony nomination for Nicky Silver’s The Lyons. She also starred in Other desert cities and revival nonsense before they moved on to Broadway.

AP again delighted Lavin The Lyonscalling her “an absolute marvel to watch as Rita Lyons, a nagging mother with a collection of strong convictions and eye rolls, a matriarch who simultaneously stifles and keeps everyone at bay.”

She also appeared in the film Wanderlust with Jennifer Aniston and Paul Rudd and released her first CD, Possibilities. She played Jennifer Lopez’s grandmother Backup plan.

When asked for guidance from up-and-coming actors, Lavin emphasized one thing. “I say it happened to me that work begets work. As long as it wasn’t morally reprehensible to me, I did it,” she told the AP in 2011.

She and Steve Bakunas, an artist, musician and her third husband, converted an old car garage into the 50-seat Red Barn Studio Theater in Wilmington, North Carolina. It was opened in 2007, and their productions include Doubt John Patrick Shanley, Glengarry Glen Ross David Mamet, Rabbit hole David Lindsay-Abaire and The story of the allergist’s wife Charles Busch, in which Lavin also starred on Broadway, earning a Tony nomination.

She returned to TV in 2013 Sean saves the worldacting Will & Grace’s Sean Hayes, series that lasted one season. Lavin also appeared on Mom and 9JKL.