Two-time Tony Winner Frances Strernhagen Dies at 93

Frances Sternhagen at the 1995
Tony Awards

Two-time Tony winner and veteran character actress Frances Sternhagen passed away earlier this week at the age of 93. I always enjoyed her performances. One of the first shows I saw in NYC as a new resident was the Ellis Rabb directed revival of You Can't Take It With You which had been running for a few years. Sternhagen had replaced Elizabeth Wilson as Penny, Eddie Albert had taken over for Jason Robards as Grandpa, George Rose was the Russian ballet teacher, and Colleen Dewhurst as the countess-waitress (she was a riot). Also: Jules Feiffer's Grown-Ups (seen on a visit before I moved here), The Heiress (the second of her two Tonys, the first was for Neil Simon's The Good Doctor), Long Day's Journey Into Night at IRT (Drama Desk nomination), Edward Albee's Seascape, Steel Magnolias, Morning's at Seven, Terrence McNally's A Perfect Ganesh opposite Zoe Caldwell, and her last performance on stage at Manhattan Theater Club (a play called The Madrid I recall very little about except Edie Falco starred). In film as the "bitch from accounting" in The Hospital, the stingy librarian in Up the Down Staircase, and I seem to remember her as a psychiatrist treating pyscho John Lithgow in some thriller (Raising Cain). On TV as Cliff's mom on Cheers, Mrs. Marsh on those toothpaste commercials, and in Lanford Wilson's The Rimers of Eldritch and AR Gurney's The Dining Room on PBS. In The Dining Room, she played multiple roles including a little girl excited at the prospect of being taken to the theater by a free-spirited aunt much to her straitlaced mother's disapproval. Though she was many decades older than her character, she captured the spark of excitement and imagination of a child'd fascination with the stage and adult mysteries.