Versatile Tony-Winning Actress Elizabeth Franz dies at 84

Elizabeth Franz, whose vibrant portrayal of Linda Loman, the wife of the piteous title character in the 1999 Broadway revival of Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman,” earned her a Tony Award — and high praise from the playwright — died on Nov. 4 at her home in Woodbury, Conn. She was 84.

Christopher Pelham, her husband, said the cause was cancer and a severe reaction to the drugs that were used to treat her.

Ms. Franz brought versatility to a wealth of stage characters, including the demented nun in Christopher Durang’s long-running Off Broadway comedy “Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All for You”; Kate Jerome, the mother of Eugene (Matthew Broderick) in the Neil Simon comedies “Brighton Beach Memoirs” (1983) and “Broadway Bound” (1986); and the youngest of four sisters (with Piper Laurie, Frances Sternhagen and Estelle Parsons) in a Midwestern family in a Broadway revival of Paul Osborn’s comedy “Morning’s at Seven” in 2002.

Ms. Franz had auditioned for the role of Linda Loman in the 1984 Broadway revival of “Death of a Salesman” — the role went to Kate Reid, alongside Dustin Hoffman’s Willy — and then played the part in a touring production opposite Hal Holbrook in 1996.

Two years later, she was cast with Brian Dennehy in a powerful production at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago — it would move to Broadway in 1999 — in which she took a more assertive approach to the role, departing from portraying Linda as a beaten-down character as previous actresses had done.

“She loves this man,” Ms. Franz told The Star-Ledger of Newark in 1999. “She feels that her safest place in the world is with this man. But she’s not passive.”

She added: “She’ll fight to the nth degree for her family and her self-respect.”

Mr. Miller, who won the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 1949 for “Death of a Salesman,” told The New York Times in 1999 that Ms. Franz “has 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.”

Ms. Franz delivered Linda’s admonition to her ungrateful sons about their father — “attention must be paid”— with righteous anger, and in the final scene, at Willy’s grave, she threw herself down in grief, disregarding the stage directions that called for Linda to sit at the graveside. Ms. Franz told The Star-Ledger that making Linda’s reaction more physically extreme was “screaming out of me,” and that the director, Robert Falls, had agreed to the change.

Richard Christiansen, a theater critic for The Chicago Tribune, called the gesture “immensely touching and profoundly shocking.”

The 1999 Broadway production won four Tonys, including Ms. Franz’s for best featured actress in a play. She had been nominated once before, in the same category, for “Brighton Beach Memoirs,” and would receive a third nomination for “Morning’s at Seven.”

Ms. Franz reprised the role of Linda in a TV adaptation of the “Death of a Salesman” production in 2000, winning an Emmy Award for her performance.

Elizabeth Jean Frankovitch was born on June 18, 1941, in Akron, Ohio. Her father, Joseph, worked in a tire factory. Her mother, Harriet (Blue) Frankovitch, a part-time waitress, was mentally ill and would disappear for months at a time. “I remember holding onto my father and saying, ‘She’ll come back,’” Ms. Franz told The Times in 1999.

Her father’s experience as a blue-collar worker informed her portrayal of Linda Loman. After 36 years on the job, he was fired the day he returned to the factory after illness had kept him away for two and a half months. “He got a gold watch, which he had to pawn to pay the mortgage,” Ms. Franz told The Times, and he died the day the mortgage was paid off, an experience that recalled Willy Loman’s.

“It killed my father, really,” she told The Star-Ledger, referring to the job termination. “He didn’t commit suicide, like Willy. He didn’t have to.”

When she was 5, watching Loretta Young in the 1947 movie “The Bishop’s Wife” inspired Elizabeth to become an actress, a profession, she said, that enabled her to act out emotions that she had repressed while coping with her parents. She earned enough money as a secretary to attend the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in Manhattan. Graduating in 1962, she adopted Franz, a shortened version of Frankovitch, as her new surname.

Early in her career, Ms. Franz performed at Weathervane Playhouse in Akron, the Repertory Theater of St. Louis and the Dorset Playhouse in Vermont, where she appeared in 58 summer stock productions over the years.

She also appeared in Off Broadway plays, most significantly “Sister Mary Ignatius,” Mr. Durang’s one-act play, opening in 1981, about hypocrisies in the Roman Catholic Church. Her stern parochial-school nun was her breakthrough role.

“With Sister Mary, I loved the role; this was a woman I identified with,” Ms. Franz told WhatsOnStage, a British theater website, in 2004. “When I said that to Chris and Jerry Zaks, who directed it, they looked at me, and you could tell they were thinking, ‘She must be must be crazy if she understands that woman!’”

Neil Simon saw her in the production and asked her to play Kate Jerome in “Brighton Beach Memoirs.” When she reprised the role of Kate several years later in “Broadway Bound” (as Linda Lavin’s replacement), her character had aged, and Ms. Franz focused on Kate’s bitterness over the changed circumstances of her life, including her husband’s betrayal.

Ms. Franz also appeared in the television soap operas “As the World Turns” and “Another World,” as well as in several prime-time series, including “Roseanne,” “The Equalizer,” “Sisters” and “Gilmore Girls.” And she appeared in films, including the 1995 remake of “Sabrina,” with Harrison Ford and Greg Kinnear, and “Christmas with the Kranks” (2004), with Tim Allen and Jamie Lee Curtis.

Ms. Franz’s first marriage, to the character actor Edward Binns, ended with his death in 1990. They had acted together, as Mary and James Tyrone Jr., in Eugene O’Neill’s “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” at the Indiana Repertory Theater in Indianapolis in 1975, and again in 1981, in Mr. Miller’s “A View From the Bridge,” at the Berkshire Theater Festival in Stockbridge, Mass.

In addition to Mr. Pelham, a screenwriter, Ms. Franz is survived by a brother, Joe.

One of her most powerful TV roles — as a victim of sexual assault by a serial killer in a 2004 episode of “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit” — came to her through her theatrical connections.

After she appeared in a 2000 production of “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” in Syracuse, N.Y., with Sam Waterston, a star of “Law & Order,” he invited her to a post-Emmy Awards party later that year at the Peninsula Beverly Hills hotel.

Dick Wolf, the creator of the “Law & Order” franchise, was sitting at a table opposite her. “And he said, ‘I’ll bet there isn’t a New York actor who hasn’t been in a ‘Law & Order,’” Mr. Pelham recalled in an interview. “She said, ‘I never have.’ Dick was momentarily flustered, and Sam leaned over to tell him who she was.”

Mr. Pelham added: “And Dick said, ‘Then I’m making an open offer.’”

It took four years for him to make good, but he cast her twice, in early 2004, followed soon after by the serial killer episode.

Source - The New York Times