When Linda Lavin appeared on the doorstep of Lisa Kudrow and Ray Romano as a nosy neighbor in Netflix’s new real estate comedy “No Good Deed,” my first thought was, “Linda Lavin looks great,” which quickly segued into the feeling that it was just 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 it was with some surprise that I learned the news that Lavin had died Sunday at age 87. Not that she seemed 87; there seemed to be no reason to think she couldn’t go on forever. Indeed, 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 her Palm Springs home with friends Matt Bomer and Nathan Lee Graham.
It was “Alice,” the 1976 CBS sitcom adaptation of Martin Scorsese’s “Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore” — the only situation comedy that will ever be made from a Scorsese film — that made Lavin a star. But she was already a cherished figure on the New York stage when she moved to Hollywood in 1973 with first husband, the actor Ron Leibman, with a Tony nomination for Neil Simon’s “Last of the Red Hot Lovers.” She’d appeared in plays by Carl Reiner, Jules Feiffer and John Guare and in Paul Sills’ “Story Theater.” (In the late ’50s, she was a member of Sills’ improvisational Compass Players, which would give birth to Second City.) In “The Mad Show,” she introduced “The Boy From … a “Girl From Ipanema” parody co-written by Stephen Sondheim. New York Times critic Stanley Kauffmann called her performance in the 1966 “It’s a Bird … It’s a Plane … It’s Superman” “pure imp”: “I wish she were in every musical and revue.”
In “Alice,” Lavin plays the title character, a widowed single mother relocating from New Jersey to Los Angeles to relaunch a singing career, who winds up a waitress near Phoenix after her car breaks down on the way. The star occupied a relatively straight role amid a cast of oddballs: the outrageous Flo (Polly Holliday), whose catch phrase “Kiss my grits” was a meme in its day; the mousy Vera (Beth Howland); and Vic Tayback, repeating his role from the film, as loud but lovable Mel, in whose diner Alice settles in for a nine-season, 202-episode run.