When esteemed and popular actress Linda Lavin died unexpectedly on December 29, due to complications from newly-discovered lung cancer, she’d been recently promoting her new Netflix series “No Good Deed” and filming her upcoming Hulu series “Mid-Century 
Modern.” Obituaries in major news outlets soon followed, quick to report her passing and the many awards and accomplishments she garnered during her long and successful career. Mentioned were a plethora of stage and large and small screen credits, notably her Emmy-nominated role in the 1976 sitcom “Alice,“ her 1986 Tony-win for Broadway Bound, four other Tony nominations, and much more.
But what was missed by almost all recounts of her work was the equally successful footprint she had in the cabaret world: she performed in cabaret throughout her life. Lavin began in cabaret; in the late 1950s, she was a member of the improvisational cabaret group Compass Players, a precursor of Second City.
NiteLife Exchange publisher and stalw
art/historian of NYC cabaret and piano bar recalls, “She was bedrock for the genre—came through Jan Walman’s Duplex boot camp in the 1960s before Alice.” As per the photo (right), Lavin attended the MAC Awards when Jan Walman received her MAC Lifetime Achievement award. And according to Barbarino, Lavin also attended Walman’s legendary Carnegie Hall fundraiser. “That was a very incredible time in the business,” he adds.
54 Below production manager and audio engineer, Amanda Raymond’s first show at “Broadway’s living room” was Lavin’s in January 2013, when the club was relatively new. Raymond remembers: “Linda Lavin was such a special performer. In addition to her enormous talent, her kindness has, and always will, stick with me. I was new and nervous and she put me at ease when it should’ve been the other way around! I 
will be forever grateful that she was my entry into the cabaret world.”
Manhattan Association of Cabarets (MAC) president Julie Miller reports that Lavin “never forgot her roots,” noting that she began in nightclubs in the 1960s when Walman invited her to perform in small clubs in Greenwich Village. Later she had runs of shows at venues such as Birdland, Cafe Carlyle and 54 Below, appearing with musical director Billy Stritch and her drummer-husband, Steve Bakunas, who survives her. “[In] Linda’s own words, what cabaret offered her,” 
says Miller, “was a home where she could just sing her songs and tell her stories.” Lavin was presented with her own MAC Lifetime Achievement Award in 2014. According to Miller, “Linda spoke that night of how excited and also terrified she was to return to the cabaret stage, and noted how special it was to be in a room of cabaret performers, where everyone was joyous and truly loved just being there and performing for others… She was a truly gracious woman and role model for the whole community.”
Lavin once happened to have an apartment in the same building as Billy Stritch. During the pandemic lockdown, the two created Wednesday afternoon livestreams, which were notably posted on Facebook. That COVID bubble was a natural outgrowth of the close 
friendship the two shared over many years. As he posted on Facebook, Lavin “was like a big sister to me and our bond only got stronger and deeper with each passing year.” Stritch added, “The world knows what a consummate artist Linda was. I never saw her on stage or on the screen when she didn’t give an astonishing and fully developed performance. Head and shoulders above the rest. She completely awed me with her artistry.”
Linda Lavin was born on Oct. 15, 1937, in Portland, Maine, the second child of David Joseph Lavin, a businessman and Lucille (Potter) Lavin, a former operatic soprano who encouraged her toward performing. She began entertaining as a child, acted in high school and majored in theater at William and Mary College in Williamsburg, VA. The rest, over seven decades, is history and legend, and an everlasting gift to the world of entertainment.
