Elaine Stritch — one of Broadway’s boldest and brassiest performers — has died. With that gravelly voice — and those long legs — and that utter command of the stage, Stritch was a bona fide Broadway star. Not as a classic leading lady, necessarily, but as the hardened-yet-vulnerable performer audiences couldn’t forget. Stritch died of natural causes Thursday morning at her home in Birmingham, Mich. She was 89.
In an interview with Stritch in March 2014, NPR’s Scott Simon observed that the stage and screen legend “may be her own greatest character.”
In a career that stretched back to the 1940s, Stritch did it all: theater, TV, movies. She was nominated for several Tony Awards and won three Emmys. She starred in the 1961 Noel Coward musical Sail Away and the 1970 Stephen Sondheim musical Company. (With her performance of “Ladies Who Lunch,” Sondheim said Stritch turned what he thought was “just a simple saloon song” into a “piece of theater.”
Stritch was born in Detroit, where her father was a rubber company executive. She was raised Roman Catholic and when she first moved to New York City, she went to a finishing school at the Convent of the Sacred Heart. Years later, Broadway producer Hal Prince said Stritch had “the guts of a jailbird” but “the convent girl is still there.”
It’s been said that Stritch could always play older than she really was. She was 20 when she sang Zip in Pal Joey but Stritch herself said she looked 40. She had a terrific sense of humor about her looks — and her age. In 1988, Stritch told NPR’s Susan Stamberg that she didn’t mind the word “aging” at all.