Can you guess who this iconic 1970s comedy star, who also won a Tony Award, is? At 86 years old, she’s unrecognizable
This week, at the age of 86, a legendary comedy star from the 1970s reappeared in Los Angeles, completely unrecognizable.
She left her home state of Maine to pursue a lucrative career on Broadway before moving to Hollywood to pursue a television career.
Based on the Martin Scorsese film Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, she rose to fame on the small screen in the comedy series Alice.
After the performance, she went back to the New York stage and won a Tony Award for Broadway Bound, a well-liked Neil Simon play.
She cut a lively and vivacious figure when she went out this week in California, with high-slit pants and a chic floral shirt.
Who is she?
She is Linda Lavin, who starred in nine seasons of the phenomenally successful CBS comedy Alice as the show’s titular character from 1976 to 1985.Martin Scorsese’s 1974 film Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore served as the inspiration for the television show.
In the film, Ellen Burstyn played a recently widowed mother of a small boy who relocates to Arizona and takes a job at a diner. In the end, she has a sexual relationship with a young customer of the restaurant, portrayed by Kris Kristofferson, a former rock star who is now an actor.
The sitcom adaption of Alice starred Linda in the lead role and featured Philip McKeon as her son Tommy. The show ran for more than 200 episodes.
Linda benefited from having a musical background because she was born into a Russian Jewish family in Portland, Maine, where her mother was an opera singer.
Her career started on the New York stage, where she appeared in Broadway productions. It’s a Bird.A plane, that is…1968 sees Superman.
Her early performances included a spoof of the iconic Antonio Carlos Jobim bossa nova ballad The Girl From Ipanema by Stephen Sondheim’s The Mad Show, an off-Broadway revue based by Mad magazine, in which she sang.
In 1970, she received her first Tony nomination for the role of Doris Roberts and James Coco in Neil Simon’s Last of the Red Hot Lovers.
But it wasn’t until she moved to Los Angeles in the middle of the 1970s to pursue a career in acting that she became a true national celebrity.
A recurrent appearance as a detective in the first two seasons of the police sitcom Barney Miller in 1975 and 1976 was one of her early breakout television performances.
She then got the role that turned her into a household name in 1976; she played Alice on CBS for nine years, and in 1979, the program received an Emmy nomination.
Following the conclusion of the series in 1986, she made a triumphant comeback to the Great White Way as Broadway Bound, the final production of Neil Simon’s semi-autobiographical trilogy, featured her.
In 1987, Linda, who portrayed a role perhaps inspired by the playwright’s mother, took home the Tony Award for best lead actress in a play.
Her Broadway career continued, and in 1998 she received another Tony nomination for her performance in The Diary of Anne Frank, which starred Natalie Portman, then 16 years old, in the lead role.
In addition, Linda filled in for Madeline Kahn in the Broadway hitmaker Wendy Wasserstein’s smash play The Sisters Rosensweig.
She has continued to remain active in the television industry, making appearances as a guest star on popular shows including The Good Wife, Bob’s Burgers, The O.C., and The Sopranos. She recently filmed a pilot for Ryan Murphy’s LGBT take on The Golden Girls, titled Mid-Century Modern, which starred Matt Bomer and Nathan Lane.
She has gone through two divorces in her personal life: the first was from Broadway actor Ron Leibman, and the second was from Kip Niven, who costarred with her in Alice.
She has been blissfully married to Steve Bakunas, an actor who is twenty years her junior and has appeared in television shows including One Tree Hill, since Valentine’s Day 2005.
