“There’s a New Girl in Town” opened every episode of Alice, and Linda Lavin sang it herself. The Portland, Maine native was born on October 15, 1937, and she would have turned 89 today. She died on December 29, 2024, at 87 from complications of lung cancer.
She was still working when she died. Lavin was in the middle of a new Hulu sitcom, and she left its writers one clear instruction about how to handle whatever came next. They followed it to the letter.
How Did Linda Lavin Land At Mel’s Diner?
Alice premiered on CBS on August 31, 1976, which makes 2026 the show’s 50th anniversary year. Lavin played Alice Hyatt, a widowed mother and aspiring singer who took a waitress job at a Phoenix diner. The series was based on Martin Scorsese’s 1974 film Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, according to Playbill and the Associated Press.
Before Mel’s Diner, she played Detective Janice Wentworth on Barney Miller. That recurring role, which began in 1975, led CBS to cast her as Alice, TheWrap reported. Polly Holliday and Vic Tayback rounded out the diner, and Holliday’s Flo made “Kiss my grits” a national catchphrase, as the Associated Press noted.
The series ran nine seasons, until 1985, and brought Lavin two Golden Globes and an Emmy nomination. The AP wrote that she became a role model for working moms. This fall, DYR looked at which Alice cast members are still with us half a century later.
Alice Hyatt wanted to be a singer. Lavin already was one, and the stage had come first.
What Kept Her Working For Seven Decades?
Lavin made her stage debut at 5, Playbill reported. At her show’s Hulu premiere in 2025, co-star Nathan Lee Graham put it this way: “She worked from the age of 5 to 87 and went out blazing like the star she was,” he told TheWrap.
Neil Simon’s Last of the Red Hot Lovers brought her a first Tony nomination in 1970. She went on to six nominations in all, according to Playbill and TheWrap. She won the 1987 Tony Award for Best Actress in a Play as Kate in Simon’s Broadway Bound. Later nominations came for The Tale of the Allergist’s Wife, Collected Stories and The Lyons, the AP reported. Her final Broadway show was Our Mother’s Brief Affair in 2016, Playbill noted.
She explained her long run to the AP in 2011. “I say that what happened for me was that work brings work,” she said. “As long as it wasn’t morally reprehensible to me, I did it.”
Work kept bringing work into her late 80s. In December 2024 she was promoting the Netflix series No Good Deed, according to TheWrap and the AP. She also had a new sitcom underway.
What Was Linda Filming When The Diagnosis Came?
The new show was Hulu’s Mid-Century Modern, from Will & Grace creators Max Mutchnick and David Kohan. In it, three old friends decide to spend their later years together in Palm Springs, TheWrap reported. Nathan Lane, Matt Bomer and Nathan Lee Graham starred. Lavin played Sybil Schneiderman, the mother of Lane’s character, Bunny.
Her lung cancer diagnosis came in the middle of filming. Kohan told TV Insider that she said, “I don’t know how I’m going to respond to this, but whatever it is, write it into the character.” Mutchnick told Entertainment Weekly she was “very clear with us about making sure that we wrote everything that was going on with her into the show.”
Lane had long admired her. “I had seen her in ‘Broadway Bound,’ for which she won the Tony,” he told TheWrap. “So this was very meaningful and emotional that she ended up playing my mother.”
When she died, three of the season’s ten episodes were still unfilmed, TheWrap and Entertainment Weekly reported.
How Did ‘Mid-Century Modern’ Say Goodbye To Sybil?
She had filmed seven episodes, with enough extra footage for an eighth, according to TheWrap. Episode 8 was next on the schedule. Instead, the cast returned and skipped ahead to episode 9, filmed a couple of weeks after her death, Entertainment Weekly reported. Mutchnick called it “the healthiest way for all of us to deal with it.”
The ninth episode, “Here’s to You, Mrs. Schneiderman,” became Sybil’s farewell. In it, Bunny tells his friends that his mother died in the car as he rushed her to the hospital. He remembers rolling down the window so she could breathe, and doing 90 on the road.
According to Entertainment Weekly, that scene echoed Lavin’s own last drive to the hospital with her husband, Steve Bakunas. Lane said the monologue held “some of the real conversation” between them. “We were still kind of reeling just from hearing that she had died,” he said. Telling the story as Bunny “was overwhelmingly emotional,” he added, and “it’s a way of paying tribute to her.”
In that last episode, Bunny remembers the words his mother spoke on the way to the hospital. Written for Sybil and drawn from Lavin’s own life, they read now like her goodbye to all of us: “If I die, I love you.”
