Award-winning Broadway actress and television star Elizabeth Franz dies aged 84
Her husband revealed that she suffered a ‘severe reaction’ to cancer treatment
BROADWAY star Elizabeth Franz has died at the age of 84, her husband has confirmed.
The Tony Award-winning actress had been diagnosed with cancer.
Her husband Christopher Pelham told The New York Times that she died as a result of the disease and a “severe reaction” she suffered from the treatment.
She died at home on November 4 in Woodbury, Connecticut.
Franz is best known for playing Linda Loman in a 1999 Broadway revival of Arthur Miller’s ‘Death of a Salesman’.
It was this role that earned her a Tony Award and solidified her name among other Broadway greats.
That production scooped four awards, including the one given to Franz for best featured actress in a play.
Miller himself praised the actress saying she “discovered in the role the basic underlying powerful protectiveness, which comes out as fury, and that in the past, in every performance I know of, was simply washed out”.
She was also nominated for her performances in ‘Brighton Beach Memoirs’, a comedy by Neil Simon in 1983, and in 2002 for her role in Paul Osborn’s ‘Morning’s at Seven’.
Other Broadway appearances include roles in, The Cherry Orchard, The Octette Bridge Club, The Cemetery Club, Getting Married, Uncle Vanya, and The Miracle Worker.
As well as success on stage, Franz took to the big screen, securing roles in movies and television.
She starred alongside Robert De Niro in the 1989 film ‘Jacknife’, with Harrison Ford in ‘Sabrina’ in 1995 , and next to Jamie Lee Curtis in the 2004 film ‘Christmas with the Kranks’, just to name a few.
Franz also took up roles in television shows including as Mia in Gilmore Girls, Marsha in Roseanne, and Gladys Lear in Sisters.
Other shows include Law & Order, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, Homeland, and Grey’s Anatomy.
She also returned to the role of Linda in a television version of Death of a Salesman in 2000.
For this performance, she secured an Emmy Award.
Franz is survived by her husband and her brother, Joe.
She was born in Akron, Ohio in 1941 and graduated from the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York in 1962.
Her father worked in a local tire factory and her mother was a part-time waitress but struggled with her mental health and would leave for months at a time while she was growing up, Franz told the Times.
In 1983, she married her first husband actor Edward Binns.
The pair starred alongside each other on stage on a number of occasions until he died aged 74 in 1990.
She then later married Pelham.
