Linda Lavin, the Tony Award-winning Broadway actress who was best known for starring as a waitress and single mom on the long-running sitcom “Alice,” died Sunday in Los Angeles. She was 87.

Michael Gagliardo, a representative, said the cause was complications of lung cancer.

To most American television viewers, Lavin was a new face when “Alice” — a comedy based on the movie “Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore,” Martin Scorsese’s 1974 drama starring Ellen Burstyn — had its premiere. Playing a widowed mother who, on her way to pursue a musical career in Los Angeles, takes a job at Mel’s Diner after her car breaks down, Lavin wasn’t yet widely known nationally. But to theatergoers, especially in New York, she was a proven quantity, having performed in eight Broadway productions between 1962 and 1973, including the lead role in Neil Simon’s “Last of the Red Hot Lovers” (1969).

“Alice” ran from 1976 to 1985 and earned Lavin two Golden Globe Awards and an Emmy nomination. After the show ended, she promptly returned to her first love, the New York stage, and in 1987 won the Tony Award for best actress in a play for her role as Kate Jerome, a 1940s Brooklyn matriarch facing the postwar world, in Simon’s “Broadway Bound.”

In his review of the play in The New York Times, Frank Rich called the character “a remarkable achievement — a Jewish mother who redefines the genre even as she gets the requisite laughs while fretting over her children’s health or an unattended pot roast.” Kate is “a woman who takes ‘her own quiet pleasure’ in a world that goes no farther than her subway line,” Rich wrote.

“One only wishes,” he added, “that Ms. Lavin, whose touching performance is of the same high integrity as the writing, could stay in the role forever.”

Linda Lavin was born Oct. 15, 1937, in Portland, Maine, the second child of David Joseph Lavin, a businessman, and Lucille (Potter) Lavin, a former operatic soprano. All four of her grandparents were Jewish immigrants from Russia.

Linda Lavin began performing as a child and majored in theater at William & Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia.

In the late 1950s, she was a member of the Compass Players, an improvisational cabaret group that was a precursor of the Second City company. After some time in a theater job in Boston, she moved to New York — her first roommate was a fellow aspiring actress, Olympia Dukakis — and made her New York stage debut in an off-Broadway musical, “Oh, Kay!” in 1960. Lavin’s Broadway debut came two years later, in multiple roles in the musical “A Family Affair,” directed by Hal Prince.

Although she had appeared on a few episodes of the daytime drama “The Doctors,” in 1963, her television career didn’t flourish until 1975, when she had a recurring role as a police detective on the hit sitcom “Barney Miller.” Her own series, “Alice,” came along the next year.

Films were not a notable part of Lavin’s career, at first. She was at the height of her fame, in the final season of “Alice,” when — in her mid-40s — she made her movie debut. It was a celebrity cameo as a seemingly nice doctor who twists Kermit the Frog all out of shape (literally) in “The Muppets Take Manhattan” (1984).

This year, Lavin appeared in three episodes of the Netflix comedy “No Good Deed.” And in 2025 she’ll be seen in leading roles in two other productions: alongside Nathan Lane and Matt Bomer in a new comedy series on Hulu, “Mid-Century Modern.”