Lynn Cohen, Sex and the City Alum and Off-Broadway Veteran, Dies at 86

Lynn Cohen, an admired character actress who cultivated a regular presence off-Broadway since the late 1970s, died in New York City on February 14. She was 86.

Cohen appeared on Broadway twice. She made her debut in 1989 opposite Vanessa Redgrave in director Peter Hall’s production of Orpheus Descending. Then in 1997, she played the role of Avdotya Nazarovna in a revival of Chekhov’s Ivanov. Off-Broadway, Cohen maintained a steady stream of parts, appearing in 15 productions since making her off-Broadway debut in 1979. 

Cohen, who was born in Kansas City, Missouri in 1933, is most remembered for her role as Miranda’s (Cynthia Nixon) opinionated housekeeper, Magda, in Sex and the City. Steady turns on television (in Law and Order, Nurse Jackie, Blue Bloods, Master of None, The Affair and The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel) and notable appearances in film (including Munich, Eagle Eye and The Hunger Games) preserved Cohen’s reputation as a reliable and beloved character actress.

In recent years, Cohen extended that credit to theater roles that brought complicated and challenging older women to the stage. In Big Love (2015) at off-Broadway's Signature Theatre, Cohen played the wise Italian matriarch of 13 sons. In I Remember Mama (2014), she played a terrifying, alcoholic octogenarian. And in Chasing Manet (2009) at 59E59 Theaters, Cohen took on a cheerful widow, Rennie, who's confined to a nursing home and plotting to escape to Paris with her roommate, played by Jane Alexander. 

“Ms. Alexander and Ms. Cohen inject [their characters] with a poignant charge of real desperation,” wrote Ben Brantley in his New York Times review of the show, highlighting Cohen's ability to meld melancholy with comedy. “Rennie’s happy reminiscence of a summer swim ends abjectly, as the darkness swallows her, and she says, mouth askew, 'Last one in’s a rotten egg.'"

Cohen is survived by her husband Ronald T. Cohen, who she married in 1964.