Tony-winning actor brought nuance to 'Death of a Salesman'

Theater veteran also appeared as a minor but beloved character in 'Gilmore Girls.'

- BY YVONNE VILLARREAL

Theater veteran Elizabeth Franz, who won a Tony Award for her bold reinvention as the wife of the everyman title character in the 1999 Broadway revival of Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman,” has died. She was 84.

The actor died Nov. 4 at her home in Woodbury, Conn., after a battle with cancer, her husband, screenwriter Christopher Pelham, confirmed to The Times. Franz had leukemia and lung cancer, Pelham said, and had a severe reaction to the medication being used to treat her.

“The legacy she leaves behind as an actor is the dying out of a breed of performer who learned how to act in summer stock and had to build sets and paint things and do lights — learned every aspect of show business while you also got a chance to act in all these parts,” Pelham said. “She would principally call herself a stage actor — her whole thing was to communicate to the audience. That was her calling.”

And the stage took note. She took on varied roles in a durable career that spanned more than five decades. There were three performances, though, according to Pehlham, that were enduring to Franz and seminal in establishing her as an actor to behold: her turn in 1981 as the strict nun in Christopher Durang’s off-Broadway comedy “Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All for You,” which earned her an Obie Award; that performance caught the attention of Neil Simon, who cast her as Kate Jerome in his Broadway play “Brighton Beach Memoirs” in 1983; and her Tony-winning take on Linda Loman, the wife of Brian Dennehy’s Willy Loman, in the 50th anniversary production of “Death of a Salesman.”