Life and Career
Franz was born Betty Jean Frankovich in Akron, Ohio, the daughter of a factory worker.
On the stage, Franz has 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 has also won an Obie Award and 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. Franz has also been 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 and 2005, Franz 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 world premiere of Kelly Masterson's Against the Rising Sea, the American premiere of Frank McGuinness's Bird Sanctuary, Long Day's Journey into Night with Sam Waterston, Autumn Garden, The Glass Menagerie, The Cripple of Inishman, The Comedy of Errors, Minutes from the Blue Route, Madwoman of Chaillot, 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 villainess Alma Rudder on the soap opera Another World, which she portrayed from 1982 to 1983, while she was performing Brighton Beach Memoirs on Broadway. She also played the role of Helen Wendall on As the World Turns from 1994 to 1995, and guest-starred in several episodes of Roseanne, as free-spirited beauty salon owner Marsha. She also made guest appearances in the series Gilmore Girls, as the inn owner, Mia, and in Law & Order, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, 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 got another Emmy nomination for the TV movie A Town's Revenge. Other TV movies include A Girl Thing, An Unexpected Love, The Rise and Rise of Daniel Rocket, Dottie, Love and Other Sorrows, and House of Mirth.
In the movies Franz has appeared in the remake of Sabrina, Christmas with the Kranks, The Substance of Fire, The Pallbearer, Stephen King’s Thinner, Fish in a Bathtub, The Secret of My Success, School Ties and Jacknife. In 2005 Franz won the Best Actress Award from the NYC Home Film Festival for her appearance in a short film The Reader.
Read more about this topic: Elizabeth Franz
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