Theater veteran Elizabeth Franz, who gained a Tony Award for her daring reinvention because the spouse of the everyman title character within the 1999 Broadway revival of Arthur Miller’s “Dying of a Salesman,” has died. She was 84.
The actor died Nov. 4 at her dwelling in Woodbury, Conn., after a battle with most cancers, her husband, screenwriter Christopher Pelham, advised the New York Occasions. Pelham additionally advised the outlet that Franz’s reason behind loss of life was most cancers and a extreme response to the medicine getting used to deal with her.
The Ohio-born actor’s tackle Linda Loman, the spouse of Brian Dennehy’s Willy Loman, within the fiftieth anniversary manufacturing of “Dying of a Salesman,” was a departure from the character’s normal defeated vitality that took even playwright Miller abruptly: “She found within the position the fundamental underlying highly effective protectiveness, which comes out as fury, and that previously, in each efficiency I do know of, was merely washed out,” Miller mentioned in a 1999 interview. The manufacturing, which originated at Chicago’s Goodman Theatre earlier than Broadway, finally made its strategy to L.A.’s Ahmanson Theatre.
Alongside Dennehy, Franz later reprised the position of Linda in Showtime’s TV adaptation of the play in 2000, which earned her an Emmy Award nomination.
She beforehand acquired a Tony nom in 1983 for her flip as Matthew Broderick’s onstage mom in Neil Simon’s “Brighton Seashore Memoirs.” And later earned one other nod in 2002 for “Morning’s at Seven,” by which she performed the youngest of 4 Midwest sisters. Her different stage credit embrace “The Cherry Orchard,” “The Cemetery Membership” and — in her ultimate position on Broadway in 2010 — “The Miracle Employee.”
Franz’s TV credit included “Judging Amy,” “Gray’s Anatomy,” “Roseanne” and “Homeland.” A era, although, got here to know her as Mia Bass, the proprietor of the Independence Inn in Stars Hallow, in a Season 2 episode of “Gilmore Women.” The minor, however essential-to-the-lore character was later recast in Season 7. She additionally appeared within the movies “Sabrina,” “College Ties,” “A Fish within the Bathtub” and “Christmas With the Kranks.”
Along with Pelham, Franz is survived by a brother, Joe.
