Elaine Stritch, Broadway Legend and TV Star, Dies
Elaine Stritch a showbiz survivor who at last became a household name in her 80s when she played Colleen Donaghy, the harridan mother of Alec Baldwin's Jack Donaghy, on TV's 30 Rock died on Thursday at her home in Birmingham, Michigan, reports The New York Times . She was 89.
Only last year, in failing health, she left New York to return to her home state of Michigan to be near relatives, though in the days leading up to her departure from her luxury Carlyle Hotel residence, The Times chronicled her nearly every hiccup she was such a fixture of the city. As it was, the newspaper noted, in 2003 the New York Landmarks Conservancy had declared her a Living Landmark.
And, just like the city, she was every bit as iconoclastic and unforgiving, to say nothing of boisterous. She was also nearly as famous for the roles she didn't keep as for the ones she did.
30 Rock costars Alec Baldwin and Elaine Stritch
MIKE COPPOLA / GETTY
Stritch was the first Trixie when Jackie Gleason's The Honeymooners was about to launch (he fired her before airtime), and, years later, she claimed in her 2003 one-woman Broadway show, Elaine Stritch at Liberty , she blew her audition for a new NBC sitcom by dropping an expletive.
The role, that of Dorothy Zbornak on Golden Girls , instead went to Beatrice Arthur.
Broadway Baby
With a voice that was once compared to a car shifting gears without the clutch and a presence likened to Godzilla in a stalled elevator Stritch may have been an unlikely Broadway musical star, yet early in her career she understudied for the inimitable Ethel Merman in 1950's Call Me Madam .
In her own right admittedly, there were dry periods she went on to star in a 1952 revival of Pal Joey , Nol Coward's 1961 Sail Away , and the landmark 1970 Company , for which she copped a Tony and delivered her own signature song, Stephen Sondheim's paean to Manhattan's jaded upper crust, "The Ladies Who Lunch."
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A very big personality.
RIP
She was a 'broad' in every good sense of the word. Absolutely able to hold her own, with any of them!
May she rest in peace!
Note: I looked up the term "broad" and googled it, looking for the song that has the line "when a broad, is a broad, is a broad", and her named popped up. Therefore, I am not alone in thinking of her as the ultimate "broad", in every good sense of the word...
Here is Time's eulogy .
RIP Elaine.