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 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.

Lavin married three times. Her first husband was actor Ron Leibman (1969-81), whom she met when they starred in John Guare’s Broadway comedy “Cop-Out.” Her second was Kip Niven (1982-92), also an actor. Both marriages ended in divorce. She and Steve Bakunas, an actor, artist and musician, married in 2005 and established the Red Barn Theater in Wilmington, North Carolina, before returning to New York. He survives her, as do two stepchildren, Jim Niven and Kate Morse.

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). She appeared in two more films in the 1980s, and that seemed to be that.

But beginning in 2010 — when she was in her 70s — she did several more films, including “A Short History of Decay” (2014), as a Floridian who has Alzheimer’s disease; “How to Be a Latin Lover” (2017), in which Rob Lowe played her love interest; and “Nancy Drew and the Hidden Staircase” (2019), as Aunt Flora, who believes her Victorian mansion is haunted.

New York theater was central to Lavin’s career before and after “Alice.” Her early stage work included the musical comedy “It’s a Bird … It’s a Plane … It’s Superman” (1966), Carl Reiner’s farce “Something Different” (1967) and “Paul Sills’ Story Theater” (1970), all on Broadway; “Little Murders” (1969) at Circle in the Square; and a Shakespeare in the Park production of “The Comedy of Errors” (1975).

In addition to her “Broadway Bound” Tony, she received five more nominations: for “Last of the Red Hot Lovers,” “The Diary of Anne Frank” (1998), Charles Busch’s “The Tale of the Allergist’s Wife” (2000), Donald Margulies’ “Collected Stories” (2010), and Nicky Silver’s “The Lyons” (2012).

Her final Broadway appearance was in “Our Mother’s Brief Affair” (2016), about a woman revealing a Cold War secret on her deathbed.