Frances Sternhagen, the Tony Award-winning actress who performed main roles in stage productions of “Driving Miss Daisy” and “On Golden Pond” as formidable older ladies when she was so younger that she needed to put on getting old make-up, died on Monday at her house in New Rochelle, N.Y. She was 93.
Her son Tony Carlin confirmed the demise.
Ms. Sternhagen gained Tonys as featured actress in a play for her performances in two very completely different productions. In a 1995 Broadway revival of “The Heiress,” primarily based on Henry James’s novel “Washington Sq.,” she was Cherry Jones’s well-meaning, matchmaking Aunt Lavinia. In “The Good Physician,” Neil Simon’s 1973 tackle Chekhov, she performed a number of roles in comedy sketches.
Ms. Sternhagen got here into her personal in mature Off Broadway roles: because the strong-willed 70-something-and-up Southern widow in Alfred Uhry’s “Driving Miss Daisy” in 1988, when she was nonetheless in her 50s, and the involved retirement-age spouse in Ernest Thompson’s “On Golden Pond” in 1979, when she was 49.
She obtained Tony nominations for her roles within the unique productions of “On Golden Pond,” “Equus” and the musical “Angel” and in revivals of “Morning’s at Seven” and “The Check in Sidney Brustein’s Window.”
Individuals who by no means noticed a Broadway present and even went to the flicks could have identified Ms. Sternhagen’s face from tv. Starting within the Nineteen Eighties, when she performed the controlling working-class mom of the oddball postal service Cliff Clavin on “Cheers,” she sailed by means of a interval of enjoying maternal figures in memorable recurring roles in quite a lot of hit sequence.
On “ER,” she was Dr. John Carter’s aristocratic Chicago grandmother. On “Intercourse and the Metropolis,” she was Trey MacDougal’s wealthy however peculiar mother. Most not too long ago she performed the mom of Kyra Sedgwick’s Southern character on the police procedural “The Nearer.” She obtained three Emmy Award nominations, two for “Cheers” and one for “Intercourse and the Metropolis.”
Ms. Sternhagen was identified to show down film roles as a result of they might take her away from her household for too lengthy, however through the years she did seem in some two dozen movies. She was Burt Reynolds’s intensely caring sister-in-law in “Beginning Over” (1979), a perfectionist journal researcher in “Brilliant Lights, Large Metropolis” (1988), and the cookbook creator Irma Rombauer in “Julie & Julia” (2009). Her different movies included “The Hospital” (1971), “Independence Day” (1983) and “Distress” (1990).
However stage was her first house, and her profession flourished in Off Broadway productions. She made her New York stage debut at 25 in Jean Anouilh’s “Thieves’ Carnival” on the Cherry Lane Theater, and he or she gained her first Obie Award the following yr, for George Bernard Shaw’s “The Admirable Bashville” (1956). She gained once more in 1965 for 2 performances (“The Room” and “A Slight Ache”) and obtained a lifetime achievement Obie in 2013.
Her evaluations have been optimistic from the start. “When an mental comedy is about to be staged, it’s at all times a smart notion to ship for Frances Sternhagen,” Brooks Atkinson wrote in The New York Occasions in 1959, reviewing “The Saintliness of Margery Kempe,” an Off Broadway comedy. “She is the mistress of sardonic fooling.”
Frances Hussey Sternhagen was born on Jan. 13, 1930, in Washington, D.C. She was the one baby of John Meier Sternhagen, a United States tax courtroom choose, and Gertrude (Hussey) Sternhagen, a World Conflict I nurse who grew to become a homemaker.
Frances attended the Potomac College and the Madeira College, each in Virginia. At Vassar Faculty, she initially studied historical past however was persuaded by an adviser to provide drama a attempt.
After commencement in 1951, Ms. Sternhagen taught briefly on the Milton Academy in Milton, Mass. When she auditioned on the Brattle Road Theater in close by Cambridge, she was rejected. “They stated I learn each half as if I used to be main a troop of Woman Scouts out onto a hockey area,” she instructed The Toronto Star many years later.
Returning to Washington, she took theater programs on the Catholic College of America and commenced showing in Enviornment Stage productions.
On the identical time she started working in New York theater, Ms. Sternhagen additionally ventured into tv work; she made her small-screen debut in 1955 in Thornton Wilder’s “The Pores and skin of Our Enamel,” alongside Helen Hayes, on the sequence “Producers’ Showcase.” However she didn’t make her function movie debut till a decade later, with a supporting function as a highschool librarian in “Up the Down Staircase” (1967). Like many working actors, she appeared on cleaning soap operas, together with “Love of Life,” and in tv commercials.
She continued working into her 80s. Her final Broadway look was in a 2005 manufacturing of Edward Albee’s “Seascape.” Her final New York stage look was Off Broadway in “The Madrid” (2013) at Metropolis Heart, enjoying the mom of a kindergarten instructor, performed by Edie Falco, who up and leaves her job and household.
In Ms. Sternhagen’s last movie, “And So It Goes” (2014), a comic book drama with Michael Douglas and Diane Keaton, she performed a smart, snarky and chain-smoking actual property agent.
Ms. Sternhagen married Thomas Carlin, a fellow actor, in 1956, they usually had six kids. The couple had met briefly at Catholic College, acted collectively in “The Pores and skin of Our Enamel” in Maryland and fell in love when each have been within the forged of “Thieves’ Carnival” in New York. Mr. Carlin died in 1991.
Along with their son Tony, she is survived by three different sons, Paul, Peter and John; two daughters, Amanda Carlin Sanders and Sarah Carlin; 9 grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren. She lived in New Rochelle for greater than 60 years.
In 2001, Ms. Sternhagen talked to drama college students at Vassar and gave an interview to the faculty’s alumni publication. She revealed that as an actress she appreciated working from the skin in, beginning with how a personality speaks and walks somewhat than along with her interior motivation. And she or he attributed a great deal of her private emotional growth to performing.
“It’s by means of engaged on characters in performs that I’ve discovered about myself, about how individuals function,” she stated.
As for younger aspiring actors who look down on paying their dues by showing in commercials, Ms. Sternhagen advised, “Consider it as kids’s theater.”
Alex Traub contributed reporting.