Frances Sternhagen: Fortunate.

“I think I’m afraid of what happens if I don’t do what my conscience tells me is right. Maybe I’m fortunate—I know I’m fortunate—in having a conscience."

I offer an apology for this piece. I really can’t write—not yet—about my friend Frances Sternhagen, and yet I felt compelled to express what she meant to me and to so many others. Here, with that apology, is the best I can do at this time. RIP, dear Frannie.

"I believe in progress through movement. In moving you find the answers, or at least I do. And you look for all that’s wonderful around you while you’re moving.”

Frances Sternhagen said these words, or a variation on them, so many times that we developed a comedic routine around them. Here we go again, she seemed to imply, rolling her eyes, but remaining with the thought, whether it concerned a decision she was wrestling with, or a problem that nagged at a friend, or a situation with one of her six children. “You move forward, metaphorically,” she told me, “but you never judge and you don’t abandon anyone. Ever. I believe in that. You move toward the hurt child, the confused friend, the part that just doesn’t make sense. You keep your eyes open, but you keep moving forward. Zoe Caldwell got so mad at me once because the said that moving forward and staying right beside someone were contradictory movements, and I could not get her to understand that standing by a person in a predicament, while moving toward a solution, were two things you could do at the same time. Zoe thought I was quite mad, but Bob [Robert Whitehead, the husband of Caldwell] stepped in and told her to be quiet. ‘Frannie is right; you are wrong.’ And that was that. Zoe laughed and never brought it up again, until she was in a fix, and I showed up, and I said I wasn’t going anywhere. I was going to be right by her side, but what are we going to do today? What are we going to do to make you better? Then she got it. We were moving.”

Anyone who was fortunate enough to call Frances Sternhagen a friend can recall the times when she stood by you, with the best advice, and with an unlimited supply of love, along with an open invitation to sit by her, with her. Her death, while expected and dreaded, nonetheless devastates, since we deluded ourselves into thinking that a miracle might occur. Each phone call with her reminded us that she was still there, still sweet, still sharp. We further deluded ourselves by assuming that others like her might rise up and fill the void she leaves. We comforted ourselves by stating that all she gave us would remain, somewhere within us, embedded in memory, but the death still enrages and shocks. I remember being out with Frannie (as she insisted on being called) and she saw a friend, another actress, who had recently suffered a loss. The two women embraced, and I remember the woman telling Frannie that it was appropriate that we get angry about loss, that we rage at “someone wonderful being yanked away.” Frannie agreed with her, and our conversation afterward was about her husband, Thomas Carlin, who died, 1991, at 11: 11, a time that still haunted her. Once when we were racing through Grand Central Station, determined to catch a train, Frannie stopped suddenly. She had seen a clock that read 11: 11. “Oh, Tom,” she whispered, “where are you now?”

Frannie missed her husband greatly, and she felt she had allowed him somehow to sink into alcoholism. “If my love wasn’t enough,” she told me, “and if our children weren’t enough, did we fail him? I still believe to some extent—even after all the meetings and counseling—that I might have been able to do a bit more, to love a little more deeply, but I truly don’t see how I could have loved that man any more than I did.” Frannie read a letter Thomas Carlin had written—to alcohol. “It was a love letter,” Frannie said, “and I don’t remember him ever being as passionate toward me as he was to the drink. It hurt. But I had to remember that it was the sickness in the man reaching out to the one thing he felt would make him happy and confident—-and absent of time and care. Oh, to be free from the demands of time. Alcohol is a tough competitor, and I just wasn’t up to the challenge.”

While she sometimes expressed deep regret about her commitment to Thomas Carlin, Frannie was mostly concerned that she might have failed to be present for people, or, that she might not respond as quickly as might have been warranted. Her tiny office right off the front door of her home was full of cards (some labeled “good” or “nice” or “fun” or “death” and various train schedules), and you could see that she was always in touch with people, sending out thoughts or money or advice, and perpetually preoccupied with being on time. Frannie, a friend said, was terrified that she would let down the person who picked up the recycling refuse. Frannie was angry with herself because she had failed to see plays with friends that closed precipitately. This decision on the part of the producers had nothing to do with her, but she felt responsible. She had let people down. She also wanted to go back in time and erase from memory a curt remark she had made to Madeleine Sherwood, whom she was understudying in Edward Albee’s “All Over,” until Jessica Tandy, the play’s leading lady, told her to buck up. “She deserved that remark,” Tandy told her. “I wish I had said it.”

There is a quartet of actresses I have been privileged to know who personified kindness and fairness and—the rarest of traits—balance. Frannie joined Julie Harris, Marian Seldes, and Lois Smith, as a friend and teacher to me (Lois Smith is, thankfully, still with us; still with me) helping, often in vain, to suppress my anger, my impatience. These are women who got me to work, to meet the people I needed to meet. To try to do the right things. I asked Frannie how she had come to be so balanced.

She replied with an obscenity.

“I don’t think I’m balanced,” she said. “I think I’m afraid of what happens if I don’t do what my conscience tells me is right. Maybe I’m fortunate—I know I’m fortunate—in having a conscience, because I’m old enough now to have met some people I’m pretty sure didn’t have one, or they had misplaced it, or it was far, far back in a closet of the heart. My parents weren’t particularly religious, but they were good, you know? My father was a judge, and he really recognized that balance was his job, fairness was a constant goal. My mother was a character—in the best sense. At Simmons University she had formed a drama club, and she loved to sing and to tell stories. I’m pretty sure that I became an actress because I imitated my mother, and people laughed.”

When Frannie was very young, her parents bought some lawn chairs for the back yard that were ornate and collapsible. Frannie and a friend learned just how to wiggle in order to make them collapse, and they sat in the yard for hours imitating the women they knew, gossiping, making up stories and voices, and finding the ideal opportunity to have the chair fall to the ground, to have lemonade fly into the air, and for a stuffy character to become enraged or embarrassed. “It was very Ruth Draper,” Frannie told me, mentioning the great actress whose monologues were de rigueur as record albums and theatrical outings for those who loved performance. Frannie did not know until years later that her mother and others were frequent audience members to the backyard shenanigans. “I had fans in the windows,” Frannie admitted.

“So I’ve always been comfortable being old,” Frannie explained. “I was around my parents and their friends when I was growing up. I had friends my own age, but I was an only child, and I liked spending time with older people. I listened to them, wrote things down, imitated how they told me things. I thought for a while I might be a historian, but I wasn’t very good in my studies for that.”

Telling stories and singing were vital to Frannie’s childhood, and the voices of her parents were how she gauged the temperature of the household; what was coming, what was expected. “I would stay in bed and just listen to what the house was saying,” Frannie told me. “That was my education. I was a listener. I hope I still I am. Yes, I am. What I do well is listen, on and off the stage, and sitting around with people. I’m a voyeur, I guess. I listen, and what I’m told becomes engrained in me. I think I want to engrain things in other people. I want to share stories and affection and experience, and put some of what you seem to think is balance into the world. I’m aware of time slipping away, and where I got this, I don’t know, but if I stop and look and listen, I’m aware of how—this word again—fortunate I am. My acknowledgment of what I have, what I love, releases me from time, the negative things about time. I can fight against time by loving the time I’m in and the people who share the air with me. Stopping and noticing the good things works for me the way alcohol worked for Tom. Gratitude is freeing.

“I’m happy right now talking to you,” she went on. “There’s soup cooking in the kitchen. It’s a lovely day. Later we’ll walk to the [Long Island] Sound. This is all good. Those aren’t small things to me. I walked past a woman last night, and she was wearing Arpège, and that perfume reminded me of so many things and people. Right this minute my children are happy and well. I’m grateful and aware of that. You know, if I have a philosophy, and it’s not one from the Catholic church or any self-help book, it’s one I stole from Jack O’Brien’s mother.”

Jack O’Brien is the Tony-winning director whom Frannie had known since their time together in Ellis Rabb’s APA-Phoenix Repertory in the 1960s. Frannie was in the first play Jack directed for the company, a production of Sean O’Casey’s “Cock-A-Doodle Dandy.” Frannie loved Jack deeply, and she always remembered his buoyant positivity, and held it up for me to emulate. “He said his positive nature came from his mother,” Frannie told me. “Once, the family was setting out for a vacation, and the car was backing out of the driveway, the father stopped to look both ways, and Jack’s mother said ‘Well, I don’t care if the vacation ends now. I’m having a wonderful time.’ I love that. And, you know, I’m having a wonderful time. I think we can all have a wonderful time, and like Marian [Seldes] and Julie [Harris] I think it’s my job—one of my jobs—to get everyone to that place where they’re at the end of the driveway or anywhere, and they can stop and look both ways and say ‘I’m having a wonderful time.’”

I received a call once from Frannie, who was overcome with emotion. She had just seen Bartlett Sher’s revival of “South Pacific” at Lincoln Center. Frannie and her parents had come into New York City from Washington, D.C., in 1950 to see the original “South Pacific,” and once she heard that overture again, Frannie was transported. The full show passed by and through her like “a dream.” “I loved that show,” she said. “My parents loved that show. We were singing the music for years. We wore out the album. My father sang pieces from it at parties. That music is in my bones and my blood. It’s engrained in me, and now I feel I’m related to everyone who was in that production. And when that music began, I was aware of that lost time, but I was also aware that I regained that time, through the theatre, through that production.”

Frannie felt related to so many people in the world, particularly in the theatre. Frannie attended things and went backstage, wrote letters, pronounced herself “related” to certain artists. Because she felt related to Harold Pinter, she arranged for me to speak to him by phone. Frannie simply wrote him a letter and told him about me, and he was soon on the phone, praising her, recalling her “beautiful, detailed” work in his “A Slight Ache.” “What she did,” Pinter told me, “was to confess her confusion over that character’s motivations, but she played with the confusion within the characterization. She did not editorialize through the acting, which many do, and have done. She applied the confusion, and it was thrilling to watch.” While I was trying to talk to Jessica Tandy about her life, she wanted to ask me questions about Frannie’s. “She intrigues me,” Tandy told me. “I feel better just being in her presence. She seems to have figured out things I’m still afraid to approach.” And”—once again—”she may be the most well-balanced actress I’ve known.”

"If I’m balanced,” Frannie said, “it might be because acting is what I do--sometimes. Acting is not all that I am. I don't walk around doing things as an actress. I'm a mother and a woman and a friend and a curious reader and a swimmer and any number of other things, all of which ask a lot of me and give me so much. So I--to use a phrase--compartmentalize a lot, and only every once in a while am I in the actress compartment. I don't think I'd like to live too much in the actress compartment, and I think all the other roles I play enrich whatever I may do when I act."

“I hate to think about people who are all about their careers,” she continued. “When I hear people talk about the career as if it were an extra arm or a liver, I just get blind with boredom. Did I ever tell you what Barney [Barnard] Hughes said? ‘I’m available, but I’m not plotting anything.’ I love that. I also think that if you plot too much, you start to look at other people as competition, as enemies. An actress came up to me once and said she hated me because I got all of her parts. I was so embarrassed and hurt, and I apologized. ‘Learn to share,’ she said. I don’t have, and never had, the power to get a part. I have no ambition, beyond working at something I love and working so that I can support myself and help my family. That’s it. I don’t dream of parts.” She paused. “And I want everyone to be in love.”

Frannie had within her a bit of a matchmaker, and she didn’t like it when I wasn’t seeing someone. We attended a production of Jessica Dickey’s “Charles Ives Take Me Home” in 2013, and when it was over, Frannie turned to me and told me that the actor Drew McVety was “ideal” for me. “That’s the kind of man I see you with,” she said. I realize that I should have opened with the news that McVety was married and, presumably, heterosexual, but instead I said that I didn’t think that was likely to happen. “Stop being negative!” she replied, and when I told her about McVety’s situation, she persisted. “Well, he’s a goal then,” she said. “Don’t people have vision boards or something? Put him on that and make him a goal.” I am certain that Drew McVety remains on a number of vision boards.

I never heard Frannie Sternhagen utter a cruel remark of any kind. If anyone was cruel, she exhibited pity for the person who felt compelled to behave in that way. She once described revenge as equivalent to burning down her own house. She dealt with gossip in the sweetest way. In a group of actors once, it was discussed that an actor with whom Frannie had worked was very well-endowed. Is it true? one asked. “Well,” Frannie replied, flustered, “I have no way of knowing, but if he is, I think it’s marvelous. He’s such a sweet man.” When Frannie told me this story, I laughed and imagined her going to that office and rummaging through her cards, and finding one that was labeled “congrats.” “Oh, I sent him a note,” she laughed, “but I did not mention his penis. I just wrote that I was thinking of him.”

“Laugh,” she told me several times, “and remember that I love you. Remember to have a wonderful time.”

When my father died in 2009, Frannie not only wrote to my mother, but called her, right in the midst and the fray, when so many are afraid to show up with anything other than a casserole or a nostrum. My mother said it was the best of the calls, because it came from a woman who had lost her husband, and it came from a woman who assured her that she would survive the grief, but she would be changed forever. “Remember the wonderful times,” Frannie told my mother, “and remember how fortunate you’ve been, and keep moving, and laugh, and tell all the funny and moving stories.” My mother shared with Frannie a family favorite: a mild accident at Disney World that became something out of a Jacques Tati film. “You see,” Frannie said, “that’s wonderful. Remember that. And remember that I’m here for you.”

Photographs: George Wilhelm/Los Angeles Times, via Getty Images; Chris Maynard for The New York Times.