Those who grew up watching the long-running CBS series Alice couldn't help being charmed by the many talents of its leading lady, Tony winner Linda Lavin, who played single mom Alice Hyatt, an aspiring singer-turned waitress who forms a makeshift family with her co-workers.

Though she spent nine seasons in Mel's Diner, the series was only a small part of the Golden Globe-winning actor's lengthy career, which included decades of comedic and dramatic performances on Broadway, including a Tony-winning turn in Neil Simon's Broadway Bound.

In winter 2006, this writer had the great pleasure of chatting with the gifted performer, who was about to begin a week-long engagement at Feinstein's at the Regency. Lavin spoke candidly and with much insight about working with Harold Prince in Hollywood Arms and the then-recent loss of Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Wendy Wasserstein.

In an excerpt from that interview below, Lavin, who passed away December 29 at the age of 87, discussed her time playing Rose in the classic American musical Gypsy, an experience she said was a dream come true.

It was in July 1990 when Lavin succeeded Tony winner Tyne Daly in the Tony-winning revival, directed by its librettist, Arthur Laurents.

Lavin had a long history with the classic Laurents-Stephen Sondheim-Jule Styne musical. At the age of 20, the stage and screen star played Louise opposite Margaret Whiting's Rose in Beverly, Massachusetts, in "one of those music tents in the summer. Years later I was finally playing Momma Rose, which was a dream come true."

When she stepped into the Broadway revival, Laurents returned to direct his new star. "It was wonderful when he was directing me," Lavin said. "He was very supportive and very loving and extremely respectful to me. He allowed me to do my own take on [the role] because I really felt that this was a road movie. This was a story about a woman who really made a lot of changes in her life. She didn't start out the way she ended up. I thought she started out much more hopeful, much more innocent. I thought she was sexy and charming, and I wanted to approach it that way, and he absolutely allowed me to and encouraged me to. So that experience was very rich and exciting for me."

The three-time Drama Desk Award winner believed that Rose "is the best role ever written for a woman in the American musical theatre because, if you take the music away, it's truly a great story, a great play [with] wonderful scenes and dialogue—[a] very identifiable story about mothers and daughters, family, love affairs, dreams broken, dreams fulfilled, drive and fear and loneliness. The commitment of doing something—whether anybody believes in you or not. We all identify with that. And then put the music to it. I think the music—and I said this to Sondheim one night, 'Did you write this to kill Merman?'" Lavin relayed with a laugh. "It's the hardest, most difficult score in the world."

Lavin said that Gypsy's first act closer, "Everything's Coming up Roses," was a particularly intense experience. "At the end of the first [act], I would just fall on the floor. The curtain would fall and so would I, and they'd change the scenery around me until I caught my breath.

"The great thing about it was I had a great teacher," Lavin continued. "I worked with Joan Lader, who's a great coach and teacher. I said to Joan, 'I want to get stronger doing this,' and she said, 'You will.' And I did, and it was very fulfilling and satisfying to me when opera singers came and saw me and said, 'How are you doing this twice a day?' because nobody has to work twice a day except actors. I knew that I had had very good training. I was taking care of myself, but it was also beyond me as to how I was able to do it."

Lavin added that the role "became less intimidating, less exhausting to do. And that was a surprise to me that I could have a little Chinese food [after the matinee] and go out and do it again. But six months, that was enough. I don't ever want to do it again."

Among Lavin's subsequent Broadway outings were Tony-nominated turns in The Diary of Anne Frank, The Tale of the Allergist's Wife, Collected Stories, and The Lyons.

Read Playbill's complete obituary for Lavin here.