Linda Lavin '59

Even Google says she was singing by the time she was five. A Portland, Maine native and a theatre graduate of Willliam and Mary, Linda Lavin '59 was pounding the New York City pavement by the early 1960s, working clubs, off-Broadway, wherever she could get the chance to sing.

Early stage credits include The Mad Show, On a Clear Day You Can See Forever, Wet Paint (Theatre World Award), Little Murders (Drama Desk Award), It's a Bird...It's a Plane...It's Superman, Last of the Red Hot Lovers and more. She made her first TV appearance in a production of Damn Yankees, followed by roles on The Nurses, Rhoda and Barney Miller. From there, fate decreed she be cast as a single mom, Alice Hyatt, a would-be singer who worked days as a waitress at Mel's Diner in Phoenix.

Alice would become a smash hit, continue for a nine-year run on CBS and bring Lavin two Golden Globe Awards, an Emmy and millions of working women who finally found in Alice someone "just like them" on TV. Lavin herself recorded the theme song for all nine years.

Her return to Broadway brought triumphs and memorable performances in an impressively broad range of theatre including drama, musicals and comedy. In 1987, she received the Tony Award, the Helen Hayes, Drama Desk and Outer Critics Awards as Best Actress for her starring role in Neil Simon's Broadway Bound. She appeared as the iconic Mama Rose in Gypsy, in the powerful The Sisters Rosenwieg, received numerous awards for her role in Death Defying Acts, and further Tony Award nominations for The Diary of Anne Frank and The Tale of the Allergist's Wife.

Currently she is running her own community theatre in Wilmington, N.C., the Red Barn Studio, as well as the Linda Lavin Arts Foundation, which is as a way to get 11- to 13-year-old inner city girls involved in performing and fine arts, during eight-week summer programs for about a dozen participants. -- Sources: Going Barefoot, Inc., WMAA

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