James Gandolfini Is Dead at 51; a Complex Mob Boss in ‘Sopranos’

By DAVE ITZKOFF NY TIMES

James Gandolfini, the Emmy Award-winning actor who shot to fame on the HBO drama “The Sopranos” as Tony Soprano, a tough-talking, hard-living crime boss with a stolid exterior but a rich interior life, died on Wednesday. He was 51.

Mr. Gandolfini’s death was confirmed by HBO. He was traveling in Rome, where he was on vacation and was scheduled to attend the Taormina Film Fest. The cause was not immediately announced; an HBO press representative said that Mr. Gandolfini may have had a heart attack.

Mr. Gandolfini, who grew up in Park Ridge, in Bergen County, N.J., came to embody the resilience of the Garden State on “The Sopranos,” which made its debut in 1999 and ran for six seasons on HBO.

In its pilot episode viewers were introduced to the complicated life of Tony Soprano, a New Jersey mob kingpin who suffers panic attacks and begins seeing a psychiatrist. Over 86 episodes, audiences followed Mr. Gandolfini in the role as he was tormented by his mother (played by Nancy Marchand), his wife (Edie Falco), rival mobsters, the occasional surreal dream sequence and, in 2007, an ambiguous series finale that left millions of viewers wondering whether Tony Soprano had met his fate at a restaurant table.

The success of “The Sopranos” helped make HBO a dominant player in the competitive field of scripted television programming and transformed Mr. Gandolfini from a character actor into a star. The series, created by David Chase, won two Emmys for outstanding drama series, and Mr. Gandolfini won three Emmys for outstanding lead actor in a drama. He was nominated six times for the award.

HBO said of Mr. Gandolfini in a statement on Wednesday, “He was a special man, a great talent, but more importantly, a gentle and loving person who treated everyone no matter their title or position with equal respect.”

Mr. Chase, in a statement, called Mr. Gandolfini “one of the greatest actors of this or any time,” and said, “A great deal of that genius resided in those sad eyes.” He added: “I remember telling him many times: ‘You don’t get it. You’re like Mozart.’ There would be silence at the other end of the phone.”

James Joseph Gandolfini Jr. was born in Westwood, N.J., on Sept. 18, 1961. His father was an Italian immigrant who held a number of jobs, including janitor, bricklayer and mason. His mother, Santa, was a high school cafeteria chef.

He attended Park Ridge High School and Rutgers University, graduating in 1983 with a degree in communications. He drove a delivery truck, managed nightclubs and tended bar in Manhattan before becoming interested in acting at age 25, when a friend took him to an acting class.

He began his movie career in 1987 in the low-budget horror comedy “Shock! Shock! Shock!” In 1992 he had a small part in the Broadway revival of “A Streetcar Named Desire,” starring Alec Baldwin and Jessica Lange.

By the mid-1990s Mr. Gandolfini had made gangster roles a specialty, playing burly but strangely charming tough guys in films like “True Romance” (1993) and “The Juror” (1996). He had an impressive list of character-acting credits, but was largely unknown when Mr. Chase cast him in “The Sopranos” in 1999.

“I thought it was a wonderful script,” Mr. Gandolfini told Newsweek in 2001, recalling his audition. “I thought, ‘I can do this.’ But I thought they would hire someone a little more debonair, shall we say. A little more appealing to the eye.”

“The Sopranos,” which also became a springboard for television writers like Matthew Weiner (who would later create the AMC drama “Mad Men”) and Terence Winter (who later created the HBO series “Boardwalk Empire”), drew widespread acclaim for its detailed studies of the lives of its characters, and, at its center, Mr. Gandolfini’s portrayal of Tony Soprano, who was tightly wound and prone to acts of furious violence. (He beat and choked another mobster to death for insulting the memory of his beloved deceased racehorse, to name but one example.)

Mr. Gandolfini, who had studied the Meisner technique of acting for two years, said that he used it to focus his anger and incorporate it into his performances. In an interview for the television series “Inside the Actors Studio,” Mr. Gandolfini said he would deliberately hit himself on the head or stay up all night to evoke the desired reaction.

If you are tired, every single thing that somebody does makes you mad, Mr. Gandolfini said in the interview. “Drink six cups of coffee. Or just walk around with a rock in your shoe. It’s silly, but it works.”

Tony Soprano — and the 2007 finale of “The Sopranos,” which cut to black before viewers could learn what plans a mysterious restaurant patron had for Tony as he enjoyed a relaxing meal with his wife and children — would continue to follow Mr. Gandolfini throughout his career.

He went on to play a series of tough guys and heavies, including an angry Brooklyn parent in the Broadway drama “God of Carnage,” for which he was nominated for a Tony Award in 2009; the director of the C.I.A. in “Zero Dark Thirty,” Kathryn Bigelow’s dramatization of the hunt for Osama bin Laden; and a hit man in the 2012 crime thriller “Killing Them Softly.”

Mr. Gandolfini also produced the documentaries “Alive Day Memories: Home From Iraq” and “Wartorn: 1861-2010,” about the history of post-traumatic stress in the military.

Survivors include his wife, Deborah Lin Gandolfini; a daughter, Liliana, born last year; a teenage son, Michael, from his marriage to Marcella Wudarski, which ended in divorce; and his sisters Leta Gandolfini and Johanna Antonacci.

In a 2010 interview with The New York Times, Mr. Gandolfini said that he was not worried about being typecast as Tony Soprano and that he was being offered different kinds of roles as he aged.

“Mostly it’s not a lot of that stuff anymore with shooting and killing and dying and blood,” he said. “I’m getting a little older, you know. The running and the jumping and killing, it’s a little past me.”

Asked why he did not appear in more comedies, he answered, “Nobody’s asked.”

Peter Keepnews contributed reporting.

Iranian Moderate Elected President in Rebuke to Conservatives

By THOMAS ERDBRINK NY TIMES

TEHRAN — In a striking repudiation of the ultraconservatives who wield power in Iran, voters have overwhelmingly elected a mild-mannered cleric who campaigned on seeking greater personal freedoms and a more conciliatory approach to the world.

Iranian state television reported on Saturday that the cleric, Hassan Rowhani, 64, had more than 50 percent of the vote, enough to avoid a runoff in the race to replace the departing president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, whose tenure was defined largely by provocation with the West and a seriously hobbled economy at home.

The hard-line conservatives aligned with the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, placed at the back of the pack of six candidates, indicating that Iranians were looking for their next president to change the tone, if not the direction of the nation, by choosing a cleric who served as the lead nuclear negotiator under an earlier reformist president, Mohammad Khatami.

During the Khatami era, Iran froze its nuclear program, eased social restrictions and promoted dialogue with the West. Friday’s election, which electrified a nation that had lost faith in its electoral process, also served the supreme leader’s goals: restoring at least a patina of legitimacy to the theocratic state, providing a safety valve for a public distressed by years of economic malaise and isolation, and returning a cleric to the presidency. Mr. Ahmadinejad was the first noncleric to hold the presidency, and he often clashed with the religious order and its traditionalist allies.

Mr. Rowhani has been a strong supporter of the disputed nuclear program. And while he is expected to tone down the tough language with the West, he also once boasted that during the period that Iran suspended uranium enrichment, it had made its greatest nuclear advances because the pressure was off.

In the Iranian system, the supreme leader is the ultimate religious and civic authority. He has final say on all matters, but still needs to build consensus within the narrow world of Iran’s political, security and business elite. The president has some control over the economy — now the public’s primary concern — and can set the tone of public debate on a variety of issues, including the nuclear program and restrictions on how young people socialize.

The results will pressure Ayatollah Khamenei to allow changes, even if they are opposed by hard-liners who control the levers of power.

The ayatollah himself had exhorted Iranians to exercise their right to vote, and analysts are predicting at least some change. “There will be moderation in domestic and foreign policy under Mr. Rowhani,” said Saeed Laylaz, an economist and columnist familiar with the reformists’ thinking.

“First we need to form a centrist and moderate government, reconcile domestic disputes, then he can make changes in our foreign policy,” said Mr. Laylaz, who, in a sign of confidence, agreed to be quoted by name.

Using a key as his campaign symbol, Mr. Rowhani focused on issues important to Iranian youth, including unemployment and international isolation.

“Let’s end extremism,” Mr. Rowhani said during a campaign speech. “We have no other option than moderation.”

He criticized the much-hated morality police officers who arrest women for not having proper head scarves and coats. He called for the lifting of restrictions on the Internet. He said that “in consensus with higher officials,” political prisoners would be freed.

They often seemed like empty promises to many voters, who pointed out that Mr. Rowhani did not enjoy the support of those in power.

But the backing of Mr. Khatami and another former president, Ali Akbar Rafsanjani — who was disqualified from running himself — lifted Mr. Rowhani’s campaign and helped win the votes of millions of dissatisfied Iranians.

His appeal to younger voters was crucial in a nation where there is an increasing divide between the millions of youths — two thirds of Iran’s 70 million people are under 35 — and the hard-liners in government who use the morality police, block the Internet and carry out other harsh measures to try to mold those born after the revolution in 1979.

Many Iranians became disillusioned after the 2009 election, when millions took to the streets because they believed the vote had been rigged to allow Mr. Ahmadinejad to return to office. The government dispatched security forces to silence the opposition and placed the leaders of the so-called Green Movement under house arrest for years.

But within the circumscribed world of Iranian politics the public looked to the latest election as a chance to push back.

When a 58-year-old woman named Fatemeh took a seat in the women’s compartment of the Tehran subway on Saturday, she did what she always did, discreetly listening to those around her.

“They were all shocked, like me,” she said. “It is unbelievable. Have the people really won?”

Beaten down by pessimism and expecting that Iran could only change for the worse, many awoke on Saturday anticipating that the conservative clerics and the members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps who have been amassing power over the past years would alter the outcome in their favor.

Instead, state television, which is under the conservatives’ control, meticulously broadcast the results that came in more slowly than usual, with all showing a clear lead for Mr. Rowhani.

“I thought they would trick us, engineer a runoff with another candidate and make Rowhani lose,” said Reyhan, 30, a poet.

Interviews with Iranians who voted on Friday suggested that they were conflicted about choosing any of the six carefully vetted candidates. But they said at least Mr. Rowhani represented a distinct change from the bombast of Mr. Ahmadinejad, who presided over a painful economic decline and increased the country’s international ostracism.

“We need to end these eight years of horror,” Mehdi, 29, said while leaving a polling station in Narmak, the Tehran neighborhood where Mr. Ahmadinejad had lived before he was elected in 2005. “I thought of not voting, but we cannot stand aside.”

“Either Rowhani wins or we leave the country,” he said as his wife nodded. On Saturday, Mr. Khatami wrote an open letter to the ayatollah seeking a reprieve for the leaders of the opposition movement, the former prime minister Mir Hossein Mousavi; his wife, Zahra Rahnavard; and the cleric Mehdi Karroubi, the opposition Web site Kalame reported. They have been under house arrest for years.

“This is a request by millions of reformists who played a crucial role in fulfilling the Leader’s wish and now they request the Leader to respond positively to their demand and fill their hearts with joy,” Mr. Khatami wrote in his letter, titled “Today Is the Day of Mercy.”

For the West, Mr. Rowhani’s election means a possible opportunity for at least a change in tone in the long-stalled nuclear talks.

In a way, the election was a referendum on Iran’s tactics in the talks. Mr. Rowhani was Iran’s nuclear negotiator in 2004, when Iran agreed to voluntary suspend its uranium enrichment. That suspension was reversed under Mr. Ahmadinejad, and Mr. Rowhani was replaced with Saeed Jalili, the establishment’s favorite for president and a protégé of Ayatollah Khamenei. He promised “no compromise” during the campaign and was scathing in his attacks on Mr. Rowhani, whom he suggested had betrayed the country.

In a pre-election speech, Ayatollah Khamenei also implicitly warned Mr. Rowhani that it was “wrong” to think that there could be any compromise with Western nations.

On Saturday, a member of Parliament, Sharif Husseini, said that “nothing would change” in Iran’s nuclear policies regardless of the election’s outcome.

“All these policies have been decided by the supreme leader,” he was quoted as saying by the Iranian Students’ News Agency.

But some Iranian experts in the West were not so sure.

“While the supreme leader firmly controls that file, tone matters,” said Cliff Kupchan, who follows Iran for the Eurasia Group, a political risk consulting firm in Washington. “If the U.S. and Iran get into a room this fall and our side doesn’t have to listen to a 60-minute harangue, the dynamics could be different.”

Gary G. Sick, a Columbia University scholar who specializes in Iran and served on the National Security Council during the Ford, Carter and Reagan administrations, also foresaw a possible shift.

“The reality is the supreme leader may be the guy who calls all the shots, but he changes his mind; he has permitted all kinds of things to be tried,” Mr. Sick said.

Putting himself in the position of the American nuclear negotiating team, Mr. Sick, said: “What would I prefer? Would I really rather have Jalili, or Rowhani?”

Rick Gladstone contributed reporting from New York.

Esther Williams, Swimming Champion Who Became a Movie Star, Dies at 91

By ALJEAN HARMETZ NY TIMES

Esther Williams, a teenage swimming champion who became an enormous Hollywood star in a decade of watery MGM extravaganzas, died on Thursday in Beverly Hills, Calif. She was 91.

Her death was announced by her publicist, Harlan Boll.

From “Bathing Beauty” in 1944 to “Jupiter’s Darling” in 1955, Ms. Williams swam in Technicolor pools, lakes, lagoons and oceans, cresting onto the list of Top 10 box-office stars in 1949 and 1950.

“Esther Williams had one contribution to make to movies — her magnificent athletic body,” the film critic Pauline Kael wrote. “And for over 10 years MGM made the most of it, keeping her in clinging, wet bathing suits and hoping the audience would shiver.”

In her autobiography, “The Million Dollar Mermaid” (1999), Ms. Williams spoke of movie stardom as her “consolation prize,” won instead of the Olympic gold medal for which she had yearned. At the national championships in 1939, Ms. Williams, who was 17, won three gold medals and earned a place on the 1940 United States Olympic team. But Hitler invaded Poland, and the 1940 Olympics were canceled with the onset of World War II.

At a time when most movies cost less than $2 million, MGM built Ms. Williams a $250,000 swimming pool on Stage 30. It had underwater windows, colored fountains and hydraulic lifts, and it was usually stocked with a dozen bathing beauties. Performing in that 25-foot-deep pool, which the swimmers nicknamed Pneumonia Alley, Ms. Williams ruptured her eardrums seven times.

By 1952, the swimming sequences in Ms. Williams’s movies, which were often elaborate fantasies created by Busby Berkeley, had grown more and more extravagant. For that year’s “Million Dollar Mermaid,” she wore 50,000 gold sequins and a golden crown. The crown was made of metal, and in a swan dive into the pool from a 50-foot platform, her head snapped back when she hit the water. The impact broke her back, and she spent the next six months in a cast.

Ms. Williams once estimated that she had swum 1,250 miles for the cameras. In a bathing suit, she was a special kind of all-American girl: tall, lithe, breathtakingly attractive and unpretentious. She begged MGM for serious nonswimming roles, but the studio’s response was, in effect, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” Audiences rejected her in dramas like “The Hoodlum Saint” (1946) and “The Unguarded Moment” (1956). Her only dry-land box-office success was “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” (1949), with Ms. Williams as the owner of a baseball team whose players included Frank Sinatra and Gene Kelly (although even in that film, she was seen briefly in a swimming pool).

The men who played opposite her in a dozen lightweight comedies full of misunderstandings and mistaken identity were almost interchangeable. Johnny Johnston in “This Time for Keeps” (1947), John Carroll in “Fiesta” (1947) and Peter Lawford in “On an Island With You” (1948) were male ingénues whom the studio was hoping might turn into stars. In terms of star power, she was matched on screen only by Victor Mature, with whom she had an affair when they were making “Million Dollar Mermaid,” and by MGM’s all-American boy, Van Johnson, who wooed or was wooed by her in “Thrill of a Romance” (1945), “Easy to Wed” (1946), “Easy to Love” (1953) and “Duchess of Idaho” (1950).

“Just relax,” she recalled Mr. Johnson telling her after the first few days on “Thrill of a Romance.” “It’s your naturalness that’s going to make you a star.”

Esther Jane Williams was born in Los Angeles on Aug. 8, 1921, the fifth and last child of Lou and Bula Williams. Her father was a sign painter; her maternal grandparents had come west to Utah in a Conestoga wagon after the Civil War. Unwanted by a mother who was tired of raising children, Esther was turned over to her 14-year-old sister, Maurine. The family’s chief breadwinner was her brother Stanton. A silent movie star at the age of 6, Stanton died of a twisted intestine when he was 16 and Esther was 8.

That summer she learned to swim. From the beginning, Ms. Williams wrote in her autobiography, “I sensed the water was my natural element.” She counted wet towels at the neighborhood pool to earn the nickel a day it cost to swim there. The male lifeguards taught her the butterfly, a stroke then used only by men, and, at the Amateur Athletic Union championships in 1939, the butterfly won her a gold medal in the 300-meter medley relay.

Three years earlier, 20th Century Fox had signed the Norwegian ice skater Sonja Henie, a three-time Olympic gold medalist, and turned her into a movie star in a series of skating movies, and Louis B. Mayer, who ran MGM, wanted to match Fox. The studio found Ms. Williams performing in Billy Rose’s Aquacade at the San Francisco World’s Fair. She was, as she put it, learning to “swim pretty” in tandem with Johnny Weissmuller, a former Olympic gold medalist who was already the star of MGM’s “Tarzan” films.

At first, Ms. Williams was one of two dozen MGM contract players who had, she wrote, “a look, a voice, a sparkle or a smolder.” Few lasted more than a year. To test audience reaction to her, Ms. Williams was given the role of Mickey Rooney’s love interest in an Andy Hardy movie. Half a dozen starlets — including Lana Turner, Judy Garland and Kathryn Grayson — had already been tested that way. Fan mail response to the film, “Andy Hardy’s Double Life” (1942), was unequivocal: Audiences loved the girl in the two-piece swimsuit.

At 17, Ms. Williams married Leonard Kovner, a pre-med student whom she supported by working as a stock girl at a fancy department store. It was the first of her four marriages, and he would demand $1,500 — all the money she had saved from the Aquacade — before he would agree to a divorce.

Her 13-year second marriage, to the singer Ben Gage, would bring her three children and cost her considerably more money. According to Ms. Williams, Mr. Gage frittered away $10 million of her money on alcohol, gambling and failed business ventures. He also neglected to pay taxes and left her in hock to the Internal Revenue Service for $750,000 by the time they divorced in 1959. By then, Ms. Williams wrote, “I was 37 and there was not much mileage left in my movie career.”

A decade later she married Fernando Lamas, the Argentine-born actor and director, who had helped her to swim the English Channel in “Dangerous When Wet” (1953). He was the first man who gave Ms. Williams money rather than taking it from her, but he exacted a heavy price. Her three children were not allowed to live with them or even to come to their wedding.

That marriage lasted until Mr. Lamas’s death in 1982. Six years later she married Edward Bell, a professor of French literature 10 years her junior, with whom she introduced a collection of swimwear. She also put her name on a line of successful aboveground swimming pools.

She is survived by Mr. Bell; a son, Benjamin Gage; a daughter, Susan Beardslee; three stepsons, the actor Lorenzo Lamas, Tima Alexander Bell and Anthony Bell; three grandchildren; and eight stepgrandchildren.

Asked once who her favorite leading man was, Ms. Williams offered a simple and unsurprising response: “The water.”

Jean Stapleton, Who Played Archie Bunker’s Better Angel, Dies at 90

By BRUCE WEBER NY TIMES

Jean Stapleton, the character actress whose portrayal of a slow-witted, big-hearted and submissive — up to a point — housewife on the groundbreaking series “All in the Family” made her, along with Mary Tyler Moore and Bea Arthur, not only one of the foremost women in television comedy in the 1970s but a symbol of emergent feminism in American popular culture, died on Friday at her home in New York City. She was 90.

Her agent, David Shaul, confirmed her death.

Ms. Stapleton, though never an ingénue or a leading lady, was an accomplished theater actress with a few television credits when the producer Norman Lear, who had seen her in the musical “Damn Yankees” on Broadway, asked her to audition for a new series. The audition, for a character named Edith Bunker, changed her life.

The show, initially called “Those Were the Days,” was Mr. Lear’s adaptation, for an American audience, of an English series called “Till Death Us Do Part,” about a working-class couple in east London who held reactionary and racist views.

It took shape slowly. The producers filmed three different pilots, the show changed networks to CBS from ABC, and Ms. Stapleton acted in a film directed by Mr. Lear, “Cold Turkey,” before “All in the Family,” as it was finally called, was first broadcast in January 1971.

For three or four months, hampered by mixed reviews, it struggled to find an audience, but when it did, it became one of the most popular shows in television, finishing first in the Nielsen ratings for five consecutive seasons and winning four consecutive Emmy Awards for outstanding comedy series. Ms. Stapleton won three Emmys of her own, in 1971, ’72 and ’78.

“All in the Family” was set in Queens. Most of the action took place in the well-worn but comfortable living room of the Bunker family, led by an irascible loading-dock worker named Archie whose attitudes toward anyone not exactly like him — that is, white, male, conservative and rabidly patriotic — were condescending, smug and demonstrably foolish. Memorably played by Carroll O’Connor, Archie bullied his wife, patronized his daughter, Gloria (Sally Struthers), and infuriated and was infuriated by his live-in son-in-law, a liberal student, Michael Stivic (Rob Reiner), whom he not-so-affectionately called Meathead.

Archie employed the vocabulary of a bigot and wielded the unenlightened opinions of a man from a bygone era who refused to admit the world was changing so much that it was no longer his naturally inherited domain.

But he was essentially harmless — small-minded but not meanspirited, ignorant but not unfeeling. Critics routinely referred to him as “a lovable bigot,” as if such a thing were possible. Edith loved him, certainly, though he referred to her, in her presence, as a dingbat and was perpetually telling her to shut up. “Stifle yourself,” was how he put it.

Edith was none too bright, not intellectually, anyway, which, in the dynamic of the show was the one thing about her that invited Archie’s outward scorn. Ms. Stapleton gave Edith a high-pitched nasal delivery, a frequently baffled expression and a hustling, servile gait that was almost a canter, especially when she was in a panic to get dinner on the table or to bring Archie a beer.

But in Edith Ms. Stapleton also found vast wells of compassion and kindness, a natural delight in the company of other people, and a sense of fairness and justice that irritated her husband no end and also put him to shame. She was an enormously appealing character, a favorite of audiences, who no doubt saw in the ordinariness of her life a bit of their own, and in her noble spirit a kind of inspiration.

Edith wasn’t, like Ms. Moore’s Mary Richards, a spirited young professional seeking traction in a mostly male workplace, nor was she like Ms. Arthur’s Maude, a brassy, clamorously insistent personality.

Rather, when the issues of “All in the Family” centered on Edith — as when she went through menopause, beset with hilarious mood swings — she became an emblem of all housewives who felt their problems pooh-poohed at home, as if nothing they ever suffered was worth the attention of their husbands and children.

“What Edith represents is the housewife who is still in bondage to the male figure, very submissive and restricted to the home,” Ms. Stapleton, a confirmed if not necessarily outspoken feminist, said in an interview in The New York Times in 1972, with the show still early in its life. (It ran until 1979, and a continuation, “Archie Bunker’s Place,” that starred Mr. O’Connor but not the rest of the cast, lingered until 1983.) “She is very naïve, and she kind of thinks through a mist, and she lacks the education to expand her world.”

Yet as the ’70s went on, and the women’s movement gained a hold in the public mind (and the proposed Equal Rights Amendment began gaining a hold in Congress and in statehouses), Edith herself gained a measure of strength and self-respect that deepened her character movingly.

In one episode, against Archie’s wishes, she took a volunteer job as a “Sunshine Lady,” providing company and support for the residents of an old-age home, and when Archie tried to force her to quit because he didn’t want her working out of the house, her explosive adamancy took him, and the show’s viewers, by surprise, a triumph for her character that made the episode among the show’s most affecting.

“A question I am most asked by the press is, ‘Do you think Edith would support the E.R.A.?’ ” Ms. Stapleton said in 1978, in accepting an honorary doctor of humane letters degree from Emerson College in Boston. She concluded, “Of course Edith Bunker would support ratification of the 27th Amendment to the Constitution, because it is a matter of simple justice — and Edith is the soul of justice.”

She was born Jeanne Murray on Jan. 19, 1923, in Manhattan. Her father, Joseph, was an advertising salesman; her mother, Marie Stapleton, was a concert and opera singer, and music was very much a part of her young life.

Jeanne was a singer as well, which might be surprising to those who knew Ms. Stapleton only from “All in the Family,” which opened every week with Edith and Archie singing “Those Were the Days,” Ms. Stapleton lending a screechy half of the duet that was all Edith.

Ms. Stapleton herself had a long history of charming musical performances. She was in the original casts of “Bells are Ringing” on Broadway in the 1950s and “Funny Girl,” with Barbra Streisand, in the 1960s, in which she sang “If a Girl Isn’t Pretty” and “Find Yourself a Man.” Off Broadway in 1991, she played Julia Child, singing the recipe for chocolate cake in the mini-musical “Bon Appétit.” On television, she sang with the Muppets.

After high school, Ms. Stapleton worked as a typist and a secretary, taking acting classes at night. This is also when she changed her name to her mother’s, feeling it was, as she put it once, “more distingué” than Murray. Her older brother, Jack, had done the same. She was not, as often presumed, related to the actress Maureen Stapleton.

Ms. Stapleton studied and performed with the American Actors’ Company, whose alumni include Horton Foote and Agnes DeMille, and did a great deal of summer stock. She toured opposite Frank Fay in “Harvey,” and was the understudy for Shirley Booth in the touring company of “Come Back, Little Sheba.” Even during her television heyday, Ms. Stapleton’s schedule almost always included summer shows because her husband, William Putch, whom she married in the late 1950s, operated the Totem Pole Playhouse in Pennsylvania.

Mr. Putch died in 1983. Ms. Stapleton is survived by their two children, Pamela and John, and grandchildren.

In 1953 she made her Broadway debut as the owner of an oyster bar who dispenses advice to Judith Anderson and Mildred Dunnock in Jane Bowles’s play “In the Summer House,” directed by Jose Quintero. In addition to her musical experience, her Broadway credits include the Eugene Ionesco farce “Rhinoceros” (1961), and, much later, a revival of “Arsenic and Old Lace” (1987).

In the movies, Ms. Stapleton reprised her roles in “Bells are Ringing” and “Damn Yankees,” and she appeared in “Something Wild” (1961) as the well-meaning neighbor of a rape victim (Carroll Baker) and as a secretary in “Klute” (1971), a thriller about a detective and a call girl starring Jane Fonda and Donald Sutherland.

“All in the Family” was Ms. Stapleton’s first television series, but before that she had appeared as a guest on several shows, including “Dr. Kildare,” “My Three Sons,” “Car 54, Where Are You?” and the courtroom drama, “The Defenders,” in which she played the owner of a boarding house who accused a tenant — played by Carroll O’Connor — of murder.

Ms. Stapleton bowed out of “All in the Family” as a series regular in 1979, but she appeared in several episodes the next year, after the title of the show had been changed to “Archie Bunker’s Place.” The opening episode of the second season of “Archie Bunker’s Place” dealt with the aftermath of Edith’s death.

After “All in the Family,” Ms. Stapleton purposely sought out roles that would separate her from Edith, and in so doing she led a busy and varied, if less celebrated, performing life. She turned down a chance to star as Jessica Fletcher, the middle-aged mystery writer at the center of “Murder, She Wrote,” which became a long-running hit with Angela Lansbury.

But she appeared as a guest on numerous television series, including “Caroline in the City” and “Murphy Brown,” starred with Whoopi Goldberg in a short-lived series, “Bagdad Café,” did turns in films (“You’ve Got Mail”, “Michael”) and made several television movies, including “Eleanor: First Lady of the World” (1982), in which she starred as Eleanor Roosevelt. The film led to a one-woman show that toured the country.

Perhaps the most significant work of her later life, however, was Off Broadway, where she performed in challenging works by Mr. Foote (“The Carpetbagger’s Children”), John Osborne (“The Entertainer”) and Harold Pinter (“Mountain Language,” “The Birthday Party”) to sterling reviews.

“She brings supreme comic obtuseness to Meg, the pathetic proprietor of a shabby seaside boarding house,” Frank Rich of The Times wrote of Ms. Stapleton’s performance in “The Birthday Party.” Contrasting her role with that of her “broadly drawn Edith Bunker,” Mr. Rich concluded, “Ms. Stapleton’s Meg is the kind of spiritually bankrupt modern survivor who makes one question the value of survival.”

After “All in the Family,” it was Ms. Stapleton’s lot to live in Edith’s wake. In 1977 she was one of 45 International Women’s Year commissioners who convened the National Women’s Conference in Houston, a federally financed gathering of 2000 delegates from the 50 states, for the purpose of helping to form national policy on women’s issues.

On the third day of the conference, Ms. Stapleton left the commissioners’ seating area and wandered onto the conference floor among the delegates. She was besieged.

“Look, it’s Edith!” delegates and photographers shouted. “Look, it’s Edith!”