Linda Lavin, a Tony Award-winning stage actress who became a working class icon as a waitress on the TV sitcom “Alice,” has died at age 87. Lavin's representative says she died Sunday of complications from lung cancer. Lavin was already a success on Broadway when she was chosen to star in a new CBS sitcom in 1976 based on the Oscar-winning film “Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore.” She become a role model for working moms as Alice Hyatt, a widowed mother with a 12-year-old son working in a roadside diner. The show would run until 1985. In 1987, Lavin won a Tony for the Neil Simon play “Broadway Bound.”
