Legendary stage and screen actress Elaine Stritch has died at the age of 89, TheWrap has confirmed. The Tony and Emmy winner died in her home in Birmingham, Mich.
Stritch, whose stage career began in the 1940s, is perhaps known for her association with Broadway composer Stephen Sondheim, his musical “Company” and the song “Ladies Who Lunch” in particular. She was nominated for a Tony for the original 1970 production. Before that, she also nabbed Tony nominations for William Inge’s 1955 play “Bus Stop” and Noël Coward’s 1961 musical “Sail Away.” She was inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame in 1995.
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Her big-screen credits include two Woody Allen movies, “September” and “Small Time Crooks,” and recent films like “Autumn in New York,” “Monster-in-Law” and “ParaNorman.”
Starting in 2007, she achieved another level of household-name fame when she memorably played Colleen, the pushy, outspoken mother to Alec Baldwin‘s Jack Donaghy on NBC’s “30 Rock.” She was nominated for five Emmy Awards for her performance, and won one. She won another Emmy for Outstanding Individual Performance in a Variety or Music Program for her one-woman show, “Elaine Stritch at Liberty.”
That one-woman show also netted her a long-awaited Tony award, for Best Special Theatrical Event, as well as a Drama Desk award.
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In 2013 Stritch left New York and her residence at the Carlyle Hotel, where she was a fixture and an icon for decades, to move to Michigan, where she told TheWrap she was “going to take it easy.”
Most recently, Stritch was the subject of a documentary, “Elaine Stritch: Shoot Me,” from filmmaker Chiemi Karasawa. “It’s a pain in the ass, show business,” Stritch told TheWrap last Spring, after the film premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival. “And the only time that I really enjoy it is when I’m in front of an audience and they’re reacting to me. That is magic, but getting there is so difficult.
“But you know, I get sick of saying how hard everything is. It’s hard to get up in the morning. Everything’s hard. Everything takes effort.”