Actress and soprano Marin Mazzie, a three-time Tony Award nominee identified for powerhouse Broadway performances in Ragtime, Passion and Kiss Me, Kate, has died following a three-year battle with ovarian most cancers. She was 57.
Mazzie died Thursday at her Manhattan house surrounded by shut family and friends, stated her husband, actor Jason Danieley. Her dying was confirmed by her publicist, Kim Correro.
Tributes got here from all throughout Broadway, together with Harvey Fierstein, who wrote, “Beautiful, brave and inspiring. A glorious voice and an even better human being” and Michael Urie, who referred to as Mazzie “luminous.” Actor Daniel Dae Kim wrote: “The lights of Broadway all shine a little dimmer tonight.”
Mazzie’s broad profession went from screwball comedy — in Kiss Me, Kate and Monty Python’s Spamalot on Broadway and the West End — to riveting, dysfunctional mothers in Next to Normal and Carrie. She earned different Broadway roles in Man of La Mancha, Bullets Over Broadway, Enron and Into the Woods.
She discovered about her most cancers prognosis on the opening day of a live performance manufacturing of Zorba! in May 2015 and refused to drag out. In one tune, she sang: “Life is what you do while you’re waiting to die.”
Mazzie later underwent a hysterectomy, a bowel resection as a result of the most cancers had unfold and weeks of chemotherapy. She returned to Broadway a 12 months later, changing Kelli O’Hara in The King and I.
“It’s very emotional for me,” she instructed The Associated Press in 2016. “I’m so anxious and excited and thrilled to be able to bring, in essence, a new me back to the stage with what’s gone on in my life.”
The New York Times stated Mazzie introduced “a touch of brass” to the function of English schoolteacher Anna Leonowens. It praised her for a “husky quietness, and you hear the fragile heart beating beneath the stalwartly corseted form.”
Mazzie was born and raised in Rockford, Illinois, in a house typically crammed with present tunes and unique solid recordings. She attended Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo to review theater, and her first job was in a musical at a dinner theater in her hometown.
A key second in her life occurred when she was eight years outdated and noticed a touring firm of Carousel starring John Raitt. In the second act, Rockford was plunged right into a blackout and the actors wanted flashlights to complete the present.
After it ended, Raitt got here out and sang for the viewers till it was deemed protected for everybody to go house. He sang for 45 minutes. “I will never forget that moment,” Mazzie recounted in Making It on Broadway, a e book of Broadway tales. “To me, that was the magic of theater. Every night is different. Every audience is different. I just love the magic.”
Mazzie made her New York stage debut within the 1983 revival of Frank Loesser’s musical, Where’s Charley? Her huge break got here taking part in Beth in Merrily We Roll Along on the La Jolla Playhouse in California in 1985, the primary manufacturing exterior New York. La Jolla creative director Des McAnuff later put her into Big River on Broadway, marking her debut on the Great White Way.
She would work 3 times on Broadway with Brian Stokes Mitchell — Ragtime, Kiss Me, Kate and Man of La Mancha. (They would additionally work off-Broadway in a live performance model of Kismet.) One of her proudest accomplishments was originating a Stephen Sondheim function — Clara in 1994′s “Passion.”
When Kiss Me, Kate opened on Broadway in 1999, Variety stated her pure and versatile soprano is Mazzie’s most marvelous attribute. When the present went to London, the Variety reviewer there stated Mazzie was “blessed with a mouth that looks as if it could devour the Victoria Palace whole.”
Mazzie was additionally a incessantly booked singer at live shows throughout the nation, taking part in Carnegie Hall, the Hollywood Bowl and with the Boston Pops, New York Pops and the New York Philharmonic. Her off-Broadway credit embrace Carrie and White Rabbit Red Rabbit. She launched the reside album Marin Mazzie: Make Your Own Kind of Music in 2015.
She met her husband, Danieley, in 1996 on the now-defunct theater firm En Garde Arts whereas engaged on Trojan Women: A Love Story. They incessantly took their love affair onstage, put out an album of duets, Opposite You, in 2005 and appeared collectively within the autobiographical cabaret present He Said/She Said. Mazzie and Danieley additionally starred in Los Angeles productions of Brigadoon and a Pasadena manufacturing of 110 within the Shade.
On TV, Mazzie appeared in Without a Trace, Still Standing, Nurse Jackie, The Big C and Smash. Her off-Broadway roles included a revival of the musical Carrie, wherein The New York Times stated she “brings out an unexpected emotional delicacy in her character’s numbers.”
She is also survived by her mom, Donna Mazzie, and brother, Mark Mazzie.
