Marcia Rodd, the Tony-nominated actress who starred opposite Elliott Gould in the Jules Feiffer black comedy Little Murders and originated the role of Bea Arthur’s daughter in the pilot for Maude, died Dec. 27, her family announced. She was 87.
Rodd’s first love was the stage, and she portrayed the pot-smoking starlet Bobbi opposite Linda Lavin, James Coco and Doris Roberts in Neil Simon’s 1969-71 hit Broadway comedy Last of the Red Hot Lovers.
In his review in The New York Times, Clive Barnes wrote that Rodd supplied “a naive, little-girl charm to give an edge of innocence to her [character’s] deprived depravity.”
She received her Tony nomination for best actress in a musical in 1973 for her turn as a deserted wife in the kooky Austin Pendleton-directed Shelter but lost out to Glynis Johns for A Little Night Music.
In Little Murders (1971), directed by Alan Arkin, Rodd starred as the predatory Patsy Newquist, a New York interior designer with an eccentric family — Vincent Gardenia and Elizabeth Wilson play her parents, Jon Korkes her brother — who falls for a photographer (Gould) she first meets when he’s getting mugged. (Barbara Cook had the part in the 1967 Broadway original that also was directed by Arkin.)
In the second-season finale of Norman Lear’s All in the Family that aired in March 1972 and served as the pilot for Maude, Archie (Carroll O’Connor) and Edith (Jean Stapleton) head to Tuckahoe, New York, for the wedding of Carol Findlay (Rodd), who has a son from a previous marriage and is set to marry a Jewish guy. (Arthur’s ultra-liberal Maude Findlay is Archie’s cousin.)
But when Maude was picked up to series to begin its acclaimed six-season run the following September, Carol was played by Adrienne Barbeau, with Rodd reportedly unwilling to commit to a TV series.
Rodd did change her mind about television in 1976 when she agreed to portray the sister of Geraldine Brooks’ character in the Lear-developed, Coco-starring The Dumplings, but that NBC sitcom lasted just 11 episodes.
She returned for another Lear comedy, co-starring as the best friend and neighbor of Eileen Brennan’s character on ABC’s 13 Queens Boulevard. That midseason show, however, aired just nine episodes.
One of three kids, Rodd was born on July 8, 1938, in Lyons, Kansas, and raised in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and Wichita, Kansas. Her father, Charles, was an oil executive and banker and her mother, Rosetta, a pianist and church organist.
When she was 9, Rodd attended a local production of the musical Carousel and “was literally stagestruck and devoted unceasing efforts to build and practice her talents,” her family noted.
Just before graduating from East High School in Wichita in 1956, she persuaded her folks that the theater was the only career for her, so they paid the higher out-of-state tuition so she could attend Northwestern. After studying drama there under renowned teacher Alvina Krause, she acted with the Yale Repertory Theatre, paid the bills as a social worker and moved to New York.
In 1964, she starred as Dorothy in a televised stage production of The Wizard of Oz and made her Broadway debut as a replacement actress in the musical Oh, What a Lovely War.
She then worked off-Broadway in the musicals The Mad Show (replacing Lavin) in 1966 and Your Own Thing in ’68 and in the Broadway comedy Love in E Flat in ’67.
In addition to Little Murders, she also appeared on the big screen in 1971 opposite Candice Bergen and Peter Boyle in Herbert Ross’ T.R. Baskin (1971). Later, she appeared for director Jonathan Demme in Citizens Band (1977) and Last Embrace (1979).
Rodd recurred as the dentist wife of Charles Siebert’s doctor on CBS’ Trapper John, M.D. from 1982-86 and played the wife of Jack Weston’s dentist on the CBS adaptation of Alan Alda’s The Four Seasons in 1984.
Her TV résumé also included a return to Maude and other guest roles on Medical Center, Phyllis, MAS*H, Archie Bunker’s Place, Lou Grant, Laverne & Shirley, Murder, She Wrote, 21 Jump Street, ER, The Young and the Restless and Grey’s Anatomy.
She was back on Broadway in Herb Gardner’s I’m Not Rappaport in the 1980s; portrayed Golde opposite Theodore Bikel and Topol in national tours of Fiddler on the Roof in 1989 and 1994; and starred as literary celebrity Mary McCarthy alongside Dick Cavett in Hellman vs. McCarthy at Theatre 40 in Beverly Hills in 2015.
Survivors include her partner of 25 years, William Lewis; her brother, Stephen; her brother-in-law, Roger; her nieces, Laurie, Julie and Farrell; and her nephew, Zachary.
She was married to lawyer Dale Hagen from 1960 until their 1978 divorce.
“Sometimes I have wished I had a regular 9 to 5 job with more security. It can be drudgery, too. But I wouldn’t change,” she said in a 1979 interview. “You’re either totally crazy or pretty sane to stay in this business. I think I’m sane.”