When Linda Lavin showed up on Lisa Kudrow and Ray Romano's doorstep as a nosy neighbor in Netflix's new real estate comedy, “No Good Deed,” my first thought was, “Linda Lavin looks great,” which quickly gave way to feeling that It was good to see her again. (You never had to wait too long to see her again; she worked a lot.) It was a small but vital part, in which she seemed vital and anything but small.
So with some surprise I learned the news that Lavín had died on Sunday at the age of 87. It's not that he looks 87 years old; There seemed no reason to think it couldn't go on forever. In fact, she had completed seven episodes of a new Hulu series, “Mid-Century Modern,” in which she plays the mother of Nathan Lane, who moves into his Palm Springs home with his friends Matt Bomer and Nathan Lee Graham. .
It was “Alice,” the 1976 CBS comedy adaptation of Martin Scorsese's “Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore” (the only sitcom to be made from a Scorsese film) that made Lavin a star. . But she was already an appreciated figure on the New York stage when she moved to Hollywood in 1973 with her first husband, actor Ron Leibman, with a Tony nomination for Neil Simon's “Last of the Red Hot Lovers.” He had appeared in works by Carl Reiner, Jules Feiffer and John Guare and in Paul Sills' “Story Theatre.” (In the late '50s, he was a member of Sills' improvisational Compass Players, which would give rise to Second City.) On “The Mad Show,” he presented “The Boy From…”, a parody of “Girl From Ipanema.” co-written by Stephen Sondheim. New York Times critic Stanley Kauffmann called his performance in 1966's “It's a Bird… It's a Plane… It's Superman” “pure imp”: “I wish I were in all the musicals and revues.”
In “Alice,” Lavin plays the title character, a widowed single mother who moves from New Jersey to Los Angeles to relaunch a singing career, who ends up working as a waitress near Phoenix after her car breaks down along the way. The star occupied a relatively direct role amid a cast of oddballs: the scandalous Flo (Polly Holliday), whose catchphrase “Kiss my grits” was a meme in its time; the mousy Vera (Beth Howland); and Vic Tayback, reprising his role from the film, as the loud but lovable Mel, in whose restaurant Alice settles in for a series of nine seasons and 202 episodes.
One of Linda Lavin's last roles was as nosy neighbor Phyllis Adelman in Netflix's “No Good Deed.”
(Netflix)
It was a comedy about working women, in the decade of the women's movement: Norman Lear's “One Day at a Time,” about a single mother and her scrappy daughters, had been released the year before. As Alice, Lavin projects a certain solidity not unlike a certain sensuality; she's Rosie the Riveter with a line of plates balanced on her arm. Not easy to convince.
Her voice had a penetrating touch (one thinks of New York, although she was not a New Yorker by birth), she could modulate when the role required it, but whatever the character, Lavin spoke with the precision of a stage actor. She could be sweet, evil, overbearing, conceited, thoughtful, impulsive, youthful, vulnerable or manipulative, layering selected qualities for extra complexity, always with compressed, obvious or veiled energy. Lavin was the granddaughter of Russian immigrants and, in later years, often performed variations of the Jewish mother: lower class, middle class and upper class. Replacing Simon in “Broadway Bound” eventually earned him a Tony Award in 1987.
Lavín belonged to stage and screen, and to his attending communities, in equal measure, in a way uncommon for American actors; There were times when he concentrated on one to the exclusion of the other, and times when he alternated between them, but never with a diminution of prestige. She may have worked more or less occasionally and moved between starring, recurring and guest roles, but her career did not decline in any way. (She kept busy during the pandemic with a very funny web series, “Yvette Slosch, Agent,” in which she misguided the career of jazz violinist Aaron Weinstein.) She was a great lady of the theater, with her feet on the ground. ; On television, his mere presence gave him production class, no matter how much class his character might lack.
The series he starred in after “Alice” were, like most, short-lived; They were all multi-camera chain shows, tailor-made for a theater fan, the equivalent of putting on a play week after week. “Room for Two” (ABC, 1992) paired her with her on-screen daughter Patricia Heaton, whose New York morning television show she joins as a quirky commentator. In “Conrad Bloom” (NBC, 1998) and again in “9JKL” (CBS, 2017), she was cast as the mother of the characters played by Mark Feuerstein. In the first one, she is glamorous and sings a verse from “Steam Heat” and dances a little. (Lavin, who sang the “Alice” theme, also had a cabaret act.) In the latter, Feuerstein lives in an apartment between his parents (Elliott Gould played Lavin's husband) and his brother's family, setting no boundaries. Throughout his career, Lavín did not enter the scene but entered into it.
She became Sean Hayes' mother again in “Sean Saves the World” (NBC, 2013-14). There were roles in Chuck Lorre's kidney donation sitcom, “B Positive,” as a cheerful resident of a nursing home, and in “Santa Clarita Diet” (Netflix, 2017), as an elderly person who comes back to life, in a zombified and undead way. You could find her there, with blood smeared around her mouth, sharing a human lunch with Drew Barrymore. None were bad, but that's almost beside the point. She was great in all of them.
