HEART TO HEART
The star on her life-changing role and finding new love in her 6 s
Linda Lavin opens up about Alice, finding true love and her past regrets.
Tshe0 here’s a new girl in town — and just turned 80! Linda Lavin has inspired generations of women as a working single mom on her 1976–’85 sitcom Alice, and it turns out the role influenced her just as much. “Alice let me grow as a woman, and she changed my life,” Linda reveals to
Closer. “I was asked to speak at rallies for women’s rights, equal rights, labor rights — the very issues that Alice was struggling with herself.” Linda is still growing in her own life, too, thanks to her 12-year marriage to painteractor-director Steve Bakunas, 60. “I’m pretty much made up of two qualities: being feisty and scared at the same time,” she admits. But today she’s
“becoming less scared, more loving and more sure of myself. I’m now in a place of great happiness, with a wonderful marriage to a compassionate, brilliant man.”
And she’s enjoying more than ever her new part as a meddling, next-door-neighbor mom on the CBS comedy 9JKL.
In a candid interview,
Linda opens up to Closer about her fairy-tale wedding, her regrets, and why she now has
“a wonderful life.”
— Gregg Goldstein
You’re as funny as ever in your new sitcom, yet you’ll always
be known for Alice.
It’s such a great compliment and reward — and completely surprising. There are children who grew up and still feel so connected to her, because their mothers were Alice. She represented 80 percent of working women in this country.
How does the show make you feel now?
It takes me back to stage 3 at Warner Bros. studios. We were strangers who became this tight-knit family and got to work every day in the same characters and venue for nine years. That’s just thrilling and very rare.
Do you keep in touch?
I see Philip McKeon, who played my son Tommy. He came to see me on Broadway a few years ago. He surprised the hell out of me — he’s about 8 feet tall! He’s a wonderful young man, successful and as sweet as ever.
You’ve had even more acclaim onstage — a Tony, three Drama Desk Awards, a spot in the Theater Hall of Fame….
Everybody in the world wants to be known, understood and validated, so to be selected for that recognition is a dream come true.
Speaking of dreams come true, tell us how you met your third husband, Steve.
It was November 17, 1999 — a Thursday. I’ll