Broadway Actress Helen Stenborg dead at 86
(CBS/AP) Helen Stenborg , a Tony-nominated stage, film and TV actress who was the wife to the late Tony-award winning actor Barnard Hughes and mother of the Tony Award-winning director Doug Hughes, has died at the age of 86.
Stenborg had received a Tony nomination for her role as pyromaniac Sarita Myrtle in Noel Coward's "Waiting in the Wings."
She died at her Manhattan apartment on Tuesday with her son and daughter by her side according got press agent Chris Boneau.
Stenborg and her husband celebrated their 50th anniversary onstage in the Coward play and were honored with Drama Desk Awards for Lifetime Achievement in 2000.
Her final Broadway performance was in 2002 in Arthur Miller's "The Crucible" alongside Laura Linney and Liam Neeson. Her other Broadway credits include the 1995 production of "A Month in the Country," starring Helen Mirren and Hugh Leonard's "A Life" in 1980-81.
She was a longtime member of New York's Circle Repertory Company, appearing with William Hurt, Jeff Daniels and Judd Hirsch in the original productions of Lanford Wilson's "The Hot L Baltimore," and "Talley and Son," for which she won an Obie Award in 1986.
Her film credits includes the Academy Award-winning short, "Her Mother Dreams," as well as the movies "On the Hook" with Frank Langella and Elliot Gould; "Three Days of the Condor;" "Starting Over" with Jill Clayburgh and Burt Reynolds; "Enchanted;" and "Doubt" with Meryl Streep. She also played an evil housekeeper on the soap opera "Another World."
She toured with her husband in the national company of Hugh Leonard's Tony-Award Winning "Da," the play for which Barnard Hughes won the 1978 Tony Award for Best Actor. He died in 2006.
The actress was born in Minneapolis and moved to New York days before the attack on Pearl Harbor. Before she was out of her teens, she had performed in the national tours of "Three's a Family" and "Claudia," bother popular wartime comedies. She was also a USO girl and performed for Allied troops in Italy and France.
She met her future husband when she was rehearsing a veteran's hospital show in 1946. In the 1950s, they performed together at The Tenthouse Theater, a stock company. For 16 summers, the actress also was a member of the acting company at The O'Neill Playwright's Conference in Waterford, Conn.
In addition to being survived by her two children, Stenborg is survived by her grandson, Sam Hughes Rubin. Funeral arrangements are scheduled for April 4 at the Church of the Transfiguration in Manhattan.