Elaine Stritch obit

Elaine Stritch dies at age 89 

She was not on the list.

Sassy, obstreperous but always amusing, Stritch was born Feb. 2, 1925, in Detroit, growing up the cossetted, convent-educated daughter of a B.F. Goodrich Tires executive before bolting for New York at the age of 17 to attend the Dramatic Workshop of the New School of Social Research alongside Marlon Brando (a sometime date).

The leggy legend won three Emmys, and is perhaps best known to younger generations for playing Alec Baldwin’s cranky mother on “30 Rock,” for her Tony-winning one-woman show “Elaine Stritch at Liberty,” in which she talked and sang about her life on and off the stage, and for last year’s documentary, “Elaine Stritch: Shoot Me.”

“What’s this all been about then — this existential problem in tights,” Stritch bellowed in that famous whisky voice at the end of “At Liberty,” wearing her signature look of long shirt, black tights and no pants. In the show she bared all of her vulnerabilities, including a volatile love life, career disappointments, and on and off struggle with alcoholism, and, surprisingly — stage fright.

It was during the golden age of Broadway, from the 1940s through the ’70s, that Stritch made her mark, with one of the highlights being her show-stopping, searing critique of Manhattan matrons, “The Ladies who Lunch” number in the 1970 Stephen Sondheim musical “Company.”

Her other memorable appearances included “Pal Joey” in 1952, in which she sang and did a strip-tease to “Zip,” as well as “On Your Toes” (1954). Other highlights of her stage career were the role of Grace, the owner of the small town Kansas restaurant in William Inge’s “Bus Stop” (1955), the frenetic cruise ship social director in the Noel Coward musical “Sail Away” (1961), and a wealthy alcoholic in a 1996 production of Edward Albee’s “A Delicate Balance.”

Her films included “A Farewell to Arms” (1957), “Who Killed Teddy Bear?” (1965), and Woody Allen’s “September” (1987) and “Small Time Crooks” (2000). She won her first Emmy for an appearance on TV’s “Law & Order” in 1990.

Stritch was childless, widowed from her “soul mate,” English muffin heir John Bay, who died in 1980. She lived in the Carlyle Hotel in her beloved Manhattan for some 70 years. After a series of farewell shows at the Cafe Carlyle in 2013, Stritch moved back to Birmingham last year to be closer to family, as the frailties of age started to rack up and impede her mobility (she suffered from diabetes, among other ailments).

“I love New York, I kiss the ground of it,” she told The Detroit News in 2008, when she was in town promoting a run of “Elaine Stritch at Liberty” at the Music Hall. At that point she was planning a move back to her home state. In Michigan, Stritch said, “I’m someplace I belong, not just passing through.”

Stritch considered the Music Hall her “home theater,” according to Rick Manore, who worked with her as publicist for the Music Hall. “We are all saddened at the news of Elaine Stritch’s passing,” Manore said. “We were proud to have had her perform many times over the years.”

One of those appearances was in 2009, in a performance of “Ancestral Voices” that included a star-turn by auto executive Bob Lutz.

She ended up buying a luxurious condo in downtown Birmingham, and in true Stritch fashion, immediately upon moving in, she complained to the national press about how boring the upscale suburb and its wealthy matrons were (shades of “Ladies Who Lunch”). Eventually that view mellowed, and she spoke fondly of her quieter life in Metro Detroit.

Stritch grew up in Detroit attending the Academy of the Sacred Heart, a headache for the nuns, although nothing serious. “I smoked,” she said. “Rev. Mother McCall said, ‘Who’s been smoking in the lavatory, Elaine?’ I just said, ‘Boy, this is going to be the story of my life.’ ”

As for dating Brando, Stritch said she was in love with him because he was so attractive “you couldn’t think,” she raved. She, the future screen legend, and friends would all pile into a big bed, listen to classical music and run lines. But it didn’t go very far. “When people ask me, ‘Did you ever sleep with Marlon Brando?’ I say, ‘I don’t like to get involved with something I don’t know how to do.’ ”

She may have been innocent then, but Stritch came to enjoy a drink and a party, tending bar in a Manhattan hangout in between acting jobs in the 1960s. She gave up drinking in her 70s, when her diabetes flared up, and spoke of being an alcoholic, but in the last year started having a daily drink again.

Stritch was typically frank about the portrait of her in the documentary “Shoot Me.” “I’m not going to comment,” she said, but did so anyway. “It’s not my cup of tea on a warm afternoon in May. I’d like to be doing something else but complaining about my life, and that’s a lot of what I was doing. But I think I had a right to.”

Stritch’s “At Liberty” was also memorably documented in an award-winning HBO film, and D.A. Pennebaker’s “Company: Original Cast Album” (1970) showed her wildly wrestling to record “The Ladies Who Lunch.”