Jean Stapleton, 1923–2013

Jean Stapleton sometimes worried that she was too associated with the character of Archie Bunker’s wife, Edith Bunker, the part she played in the 1970s sitcom All in the Family. When Carroll O’Connor, who played Archie, died in 2001, she received letters of condolence from viewers who imagined they must have been married in real life.

Yet that beloved television role was only part of a distinguished stage career, said the Associated Press, and “theater was Stapleton’s first love.” The New York–born actress began her career in the 1940s and soon “compiled a rich résumé” as a character actress. She made her Broadway debut in 1953, and later starred alongside Barbra Streisand in the musical Funny Girl. TV producer Norman Lear, having seen her in a Broadway production of Damn Yankees, asked her in 1971 to audition for a role in All in the Family, a biting sitcom about “unrepentant bigot” Archie Bunker, his “sweetly naïve” wife, Edith, and their family. The landmark show would go on to win her three Emmy awards.

Stapleton brought her theatrical training to her “poignant portrayal of Edith Bunker,” said The New York Times, making her a compassionate, likeable character despite her high-pitched whine and “hustling, servile gait.” Edith’s experiences ran the gamut “from the comic to the dramatic,” including subplots dealing with menopause, breast cancer, and even a rape attempt. As the women’s movement gathered steam in the 1970s, Edith gained a “measure of strength and self-respect” in her relationship with the boorish Archie—making her a “symbol of emergent feminism in American popular culture.”

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Edith “died of an off-camera stroke” in 1980, said the Los Angeles Times, after Stapleton departed the show for fear of being typecast. But “she did not lack for work,” going on to star in plays by Tom Stoppard, Noël Coward, Thornton Wilder, and Horton Foote. Theater was her livelihood, and sometimes her saving grace. Her husband, William Putch, died in 1983 while directing a play she was acting in. Despite her grief, Stapleton took the stage that night. “That’s what he would have wanted,” she said later. “I realized it was a refuge to have that play, rather than to sit and wallow.”