Eddi-Rue McClanahan (February 21, 1934 – June 3, 2010)
She was best known for her roles on television as Vivian Harmon on Maude (1972–78), "Aunt Fran" Fran Crowley on Mama's Family (1983–84), and Blanche Devereaux on The Golden Girls (1985–92), for which she won an Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Comedy Series in 1987. A life member of the Actors Studio, McClanahan made her professional stage début at Pennsylvania's Erie Playhouse in 1957, in the play Inherit the Wind. She began acting off-Broadway in New York City in 1957, but did not make her Broadway début until 1969, when she portrayed Sally Weber in the original production of John Sebastian and Murray Schisgal's musical, Jimmy Shine, with Dustin Hoffman in the title role. She also appeared as a leader of Al-Anon in a 1970s informational film called Slight Drinking Problem, in which Patty Duke played the enabling and eventually self-empowered wife of an alcoholic. In feature films, she appeared in The Rotten Apple (1961), as well as Walk the Angry Beach (1968). She played a vicious fag hag in the film Some of My Best Friends Are... (1971), which was set in a gay bar. She appeared in the Walter Matthau-Jack Lemmon comedy Out to Sea (1998). In June 1997, McClanahan was diagnosed with breast cancer, for which she was treated successfully. McClanahan died on June 3, 2010, at the age of 76, at New York–Presbyterian Hospital after she suffered a brain hemorrhage
115