Obituary: Phyllis Newman, actress and singer who won two Tony Awards

Phyllis Newman, a Tony Award- winning Broadway veteran who became the first woman to host US TV institution The Tonight Show before turning her attention to fight for women’s health, has died. She was 86.

Newman’s son, Adam, said his mother died on Sunday in New York of complications from a longtime lung disorder.

Newman won the 1962 Tony for best supporting actress in the musical Subways Are for Sleeping, in which her costume consisted of a bath towel and which had lyrics co-written by her late husband, Adolph Green. She earned a second Tony Award nomination in 1987 for her performance in the Neil Simon play Broadway Bound, in which she played Aunt Blanche. Newman then began a brief role in the ABC soap opera One Life to Live. “I was supposed to do just five episodes of One Life to Live,” she said in 1988. “I played Renee Devine, an ex-madame from Las Vegas who dressed to kill. The character just took off.” Her other Broadway credits include On the Town, Awake and Sing! and The Prisoner of Second Avenue. She was standby for Judy Holliday in Bells Are Ringing and replaced Barbara Harris in The Apple Tree.

Her TV credits included starring opposite Alan Arkin in 100 Centre Street, Oz, Coming of Age, Murder, She Wrote, Thirtysomething and The Jury. She was the first woman to be a guest host for Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show.

Her films included The Human Stain, It Had To Be You, For the Time Being, A Price Above Rubies, The Beautician and the Beast, Mannequin, To Find a Man and Bye Bye Braverman.

In later years she focused on fundraising and founded the Phyllis Newman Women’s Health Initiative of the Actor’s Fund in 1996.

Her work earned her the 2009 Isabelle Stevenson Award from the Tony Awards. She also hosted the annual benefit Breathless on Broadway to raise money for research to combat the lung disease pulmonary hypertension.

She started writing her autobiography, Just in Time: Notes From My Life after being diagnosed with breast cancer. “I started writing it because I didn’t want to talk about it,” she said in 1988. “Not that it was a secret. After I had 50 pages down, Simon & Schuster bought it. Betty Ford was an example for me in talking about my illness. I’m getting some very terrific letters from women about it.” Newman had one mastectomy and then had to have her second breast removed. She described it as “no way to treat a lady”.

Soon after her recovery she went back to work, first in a one-woman show, The Madwoman of Central Park West – co-authored with Arthur Laurents – then Broadway Bound.

In addition to her journalist son, Newman is survived by her daughter Amanda, a Tony-nominated songwriter.

MARK KENNEDY