Frances Sternhagen, Tony Award-winning actor who was familiar maternal face on TV, dies at 93

Sternhagen won a Tony for best featured actress in a play in 1974 for her role in Neil Simon’s ‘The Good Doctor’ and a second one in 1995 for a revival of ‘The Heiress’

Frances Sternhagen, the veteran character actor who won two Tony Awards and became a familiar maternal face to TV viewers later in life in such shows as Cheers, ER, Sex and the City and The Closer, has died. She was 93.

Sternhagen died peacefully of natural causes Monday her son, John Carlin, said in a statement posted to Instagram on Wednesday. “Fly on, Frannie,” he wrote. “The curtain goes down on a life so richly, passionately, humbly and generously lived.” Sternhagen’s publicist confirmed the death and said it occurred in New Rochelle, New York.

Sternhagen won a Tony for best featured actress in a play in 1974 for her role in Neil Simon’s The Good Doctor and a second one in 1995 for a revival of The Heiress. Her last turn on Broadway was in Seascape in 2005. She was nominated for Tonys four other times, for starring or featured roles in The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window, Equus, Angel and Morning’s at Seven. In 2013, she played Edie Falco’s mother in the off-Broadway play The Madrid.

“I have been very fortunate,” Sternhagen told the Daily Breeze of Torrance, California, in 2002. “And I think a lot of that is because I’m considered a character actor — which really means you can do a variety of things. It doesn’t mean that you can’t do leading parts, because I have. But you’re not limited to playing yourself.”

In a 2005 review of Steel Magnolias, then-Associated Press drama critic Michael Kuchwara called Sternhagen “one of the treasures of New York theatre, able to invest any role she plays with considerable sympathy. Here, she turns what could be a throwaway part into one that provides much laughter — and applause.”

She kept up a flourishing career while at the same time raising six children. She always said her family came first — commuting from her suburban home in New Rochelle while acting on Broadway — but admitted that touring and movie and TV work sometimes took her away from home.

“I remember telling my older daughter when she was about 13 that sometimes I felt terribly guilty that I wasn’t home all the time,” she told a Gale Group reporter. “And my daughter said, `Oh, Mom, you would have been impossible if you were home all the time.′ I’m sure she was right.”