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 on Sunday in Los Angeles. She was 87.
On Friday, trouble came for the commissioner himself: Federal agents arrived at the residences of Mr. Donlon, 71, a former F.B.I. counterterrorism official hired after his predecessor departed amid an investigation. They seized documents that he said had come into his possession about 20 years ago.
Ms. Gentili, 52, was found dead in her Brooklyn apartment in February after taking a combination of drugs, court documents show. Her death prompted an outpouring of grief among members of New York’s L.G.B.T.Q. community, with more than 1,000 people packing the pews at a spirited celebration of her life at St. Patrick’s Cathedral.
Michael Gagliardo, a representative, said the cause was complications of lung cancer.
To most American television viewers, Ms. 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 pursuing a musical career in Los Angeles, takes a job at Mel’s Diner after her car breaks down, Ms. 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 Ms. 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 Mr. 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,” Mr. 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.”
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