Elizabeth Franz is an American stage and television actress.
Life and career
Franz was born Betty Jean Frankovich in Akron, Ohio, the daughter of a factory worker. She won a Tony Award for her role as Linda Loman in the 1999 production of Death of a Salesman, which also earned her nominations for Drama Desk and Outer Critics Circle awards, and she won Chicago's Joseph Jefferson Award, Boston's Elliot Norton Award, and Los Angeles' Ovation Award for a tour of the same production. She won an Obie Award and a Drama Desk nomination for her role in the 1980 Off-Broadway production Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All for You, and the Lucille Lortel Award for the 2007 production of Julia Cho's The Piano Teacher at the Vineyard Theatre in New York. She was nominated two other times for a Tony Award, for 1983's Brighton Beach Memoirs and 2002's Morning's at Seven, for which she also received Drama Desk and Outer Critics Circle nominations. In 2004–05, she appeared at the Royal National Theatre in London, in the Sam Shepard play Buried Child. She has starred in numerous Off-Broadway and regional theater productions, including the American premiere of Frank McGuinness's Bird Sanctuary. She also appeared in Long Day's Journey into Night, The Glass Menagerie, The Comedy of Errors, Madwoman of Chaillot, The Lion in Winter, A View from the Bridge, The Matchmaker, The Wizard of Oz, Great Expectations, The Model Apartment, and Woman in Mind. In 2003, she received the Dramatist Guild Fund's Lifetime Achievement in the Theater Award. On television, Franz is most notably a character actor. She became best known for her role as the villainous Alma Rudder on Another World, which she portrayed from 1982–83, while she was performing Brighton Beach Memoirs on Broadway. She played Helen Wendall on As the World Turns from 1994–95, and appeared as free-spirited beauty salon owner Marsha in three episodes of Roseanne. She appeared in the series Gilmore Girls, as the inn owner, Mia, and in Law & Order, , Cold Case, Dear John and Judging Amy. She was nominated for an Emmy Award and a SAG Award for the Showtime production of Death of a Salesman and another Emmy nomination for the TV movieA Town's Revenge. She has appeared in such feature films and motion pictures as Sabrina, Christmas with the Kranks, The Substance of Fire, The Pallbearer, Thinner, The Secret of My Success, School Ties and Jacknife. In 2005, she won the Best Actress Award from the NYC Home Film Festival for her appearance in a short film The Reader.
