Elaine
Stritch, the brassy, tart-tongued Broadway actress and singer who
became a living emblem of show business durability and perhaps the
leading interpreter of Stephen Sondheim’s wryly acrid musings on aging,
died on Thursday at her home in Birmingham, Mich. She was 89.
Her
death was confirmed by a friend, Julie Keyes. Before Ms. Stritch moved
to Birmingham last year, she lived, famously, for many years at the
Carlyle Hotel in Manhattan.
Ms.
Stritch’s career began in the 1940s and included her fair share of
appearances in movies, including Woody Allen’s “September” (1987) and
“Small Time Crooks” (2000), and on television; well into her 80s, she
played a recurring role on the NBC comedy “30 Rock” as the domineering
mother of the television executive played by Alec Baldwin. But the stage
was her true professional home, where, whether in musicals, nonmusical
dramas or solo cabaret shows, she drew audiences to her with her whiskey
voice, her seen-it-all manner and the blunt charisma of a star.
Plainspoken, egalitarian, impatient with fools and foolishness, and admittedly fond of cigarettes, alcohol and late nights — she finally gave up smoking and drinking in her 60s — though she took it up again — Ms. Stritch might be the only actor to work as a bartender after starring on Broadway, and she was completely unabashed about her good-time-girl attitude.
“I’m
not a bit opposed to your mentioning in this article that Frieda Fun
here has had a reputation in the theater, for the past five or six
years, for drinking,” she said to a reporter for The New York Times in
1968. “I drink and I love to drink, and it’s part of my life.”
Most
of the time she was equally unabashed onstage, rarely if ever leaving
the sensually astringent elements of her personality behind when she
performed. A highlight of her early stage career was the 1952 revival of
“Pal Joey,” the Rodgers and Hart/John O’Hara musical, in which she
played a shrewd, ambitious reporter recalling, in song, an interview
with Gypsy Rose Lee; she drew bravas for her rendition of the striptease
parody “Zip.”
In
a nonsinging role in William Inge’s 1955 drama, “Bus Stop,” she
received a Tony nomination as the lonely but tough-talking owner of a
Kansas roadside diner where travelers take refuge during a snowstorm.
Three years later, in her first starring role on Broadway, “Goldilocks,”
a musical comedy by Jean and Walter Kerr and the composer Leroy
Anderson that also starred Don Ameche, she played a silent-film star and
impressed The Times’s critic Brooks Atkinson with the acid capability
of her delivery:
“Miss
Stritch can destroy life throughout the country with the twist she
gives to the dialogue,” Atkinson wrote. “She takes a wicked stance,
purses her mouth thoughtfully and waits long enough to devastate the
landscape.”
Noël
Coward, one of Ms. Stritch’s devoted fans, built the 1961 musical “Sail
Away” around her role as Mimi Paragon, the relentlessly effervescent
hostess of a cruise ship. She repaid his trust not only by giving what
Howard Taubman of The Times said “must be the performance of her career”
(including a delicious rendition of Coward’s hilariously snooty “Why Do
the Wrong People Travel?”) but also by successfully ad-libbing, on
opening night, when a poodle in the cast betrayed its training onstage.
The show was not a hit, but Ms. Stritch came away with her third Tony
nomination. Her next Broadway role was in the replacement cast of Edward
Albee’s scabrous portrait of a marriage, “Who’s Afraid of Virginia
Woolf?,” as Martha, the bitter, boozy wife.
Continue reading the main story
One
of Ms. Stritch’s most memorable appearances was in the Sondheim musical
“Company” (1970), in which, as a cynical society woman, she saluted her
peers with the vodka-soaked anthem “The Ladies Who Lunch.” It not only
brought her another Tony nomination but became her signature tune — at
least until, in her 70s, she became equally known for Sondheim’s paean
to showbiz longevity and survival, “I’m Still Here.” It was the
centerpiece of her 2001 one-woman show, “Elaine Stritch at Liberty,” and
she sang it in 2010 at Mr. Sondheim’s 80th-birthday concert at Lincoln
Center (Patti LuPone took on “The Ladies Who Lunch”) and at the White
House for President Obama.
Essentially
a spoken-and-sung theater memoir, “Elaine Stritch at Liberty,” created
with the critic John Lahr of The New Yorker, began performances at the
Public Theater in Manhattan (when Ms. Stritch was 76) and then moved to
Broadway, where it was a smash.
Alone
onstage except for a single chair, clad only in tights and a white silk
shirt, Ms. Stritch wove together music (including “Zip,” “The Ladies
Who Lunch,” “I’m Still Here” and two additional Sondheim songs: “The
Little Things You Do Together,” a mordant salute to marriage from
“Company,” and the aging showgirl’s lament, “Broadway Baby,” from
“Follies”) and showbiz memories into a nightly tour de force that won a
Tony Award for the year’s best special theatrical event.
A complete obituary is forthcoming.
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