Probably best known to most as the star of “Alice”, the TV sitcom about a waitress. 87 years is a good run in life.
She was going to be promoted to regular when she got the starring role in Alice. She chose well, but Wentworth was a great character.
Well, kiss my grits, this is sad news.
Bart Simpson has one less mortal enemy.
I had a fondness for the show as a pre-teen. It was on CBS so not the night Newhart, Mary Tyler Moore and MASH were on. Probably Friday. She was going to where, Vegas or LA to be a singer? Well she got to sing the opening title song.
Until reading her Wikipedia entry just now, I had not ever realized that she did a lot of theater work, and was a Tony winner (and was nominated six times).
I don’t think I’ve seen an episode since I left the United States in 1982. The only characters I can remember by name were Alice (duh), Flo, and Mel. I remember there was a regular customer at the diner with glasses who worked for the phone company. Other than that, the only thing I remember is the theme song. Weird what you remember after nearly 23 years.
I guess living in the NY Metro area, I knew she was big on Broadway. I thought it was just common knowledge in fact.
I’m pretty sure he was a gas station attendant in Mad Mad Mad World. The station that Jonathon Winter’s character destroyed. I feel like that is the only other thing I knew him from.
RIP. Here’s her performance of “The Boy From…” from The Mad Show (a rare Steven Sondheim - Mary Rodgers collaboration):
Are you talking about Arnold Stang? He was the voice of Top Cat.
The other attendant was Marvin Kaplan. He was the voice of Choo-Choo.
Was the one from Alice. Thank you.
I don’t know who Choo-Choo was though.
It says he’s from the 13th Precinct of NYC which in theory would place them next to the old One Two of NYC that Detective Wentworth worked at.
You give Mel any guff, you’ll be wearing concrete galoshes.
Yeah, I remembered the character had a fairly prominent NYC accent, as did Top Cat (a Manhattan cat) and that was an impersonation of Phil Silvers (also from NYC).
I want to say that Linda Lavin did put on a New Jersey-esque accent yet that show had quite a bunch of characters with certain accents. Vic Tayback, as Mel, only sounded like he was from Brooklyn. I’d like to think IRL Phoenix there are a lot of expat downstate New Yorkers.
There you go! 
Top Cat has always been my favorite Hanna-Barbera cartoon, maybe because it’s an animated version of You’ll Never Get Rich (aka Sgt Bilko) with Phil Silvers (who was also in It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World).
Another connection: Benny “the Ball” in Top Cat was voiced by Maurice Gosfield, who played Pvt Doberman in Bilko.
IRL, my initials are T.C. too. 
Amazingly she worked right to the end.
We should take the not Linda Lavin talk out of this thread, we’re hijacking a memoriam.
Which in turn inspired another novelty song on which Lavin performed (“It’s a World, World, World, World Mad.”)
I knew it from my long fandom of all things comic-book-related, in that I kept running across people saying — of the flop Broadway musical about Superman — it was so bad that even Jack Cassidy as a villain and Linda Lavin as a love interest weren’t able to save it.
Which, y’know, is pretty high praise, if you squint just right.
Linda Lavin did a fantastic job on Selected Shorts reading Amy Bloom’s “Silver Water”. It’s still one of their most requested readings.
I saw her on off-Broadway in The Mad Show and on Broadway with her star-making song in It’s a Bird, It’s a Plane, It’s Superman.
