Tony Award-winning actor Linda Lavin dies at 87

Linda Lavin, a Tony Award-winning stage actor who became a working-class icon as a paper-hat-wearing waitress on the TV sitcom Alice, has died. She was 87.

Lavin died in Los Angeles on Sunday of complications from recently discovered lung cancer, her representative, Bill Veloric, told



The Associated Press in an email.

A success on Broadway, Lavin tried her luck in Hollywood in the mid-1970s. She was chosen to star in a new CBS sitcom based on Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, the Martin Scorsese-directed film that won Ellen Burstyn an Oscar for playing the title waitress.