Bonnie Franklin

Bonnie Gail Franklin was born on January 6, 1944, in Santa Monica, California, to Claire (née Hersch) and Samuel Benjamin Franklin, an investment banker who established the Beverly Hills chapter of B'nai B'rith. Both of her parents were Jewish immigrants — her father from Russia and her mother from Romania — who married in Montreal before relocating to the United States. Franklin grew up in Santa Monica before her family moved to Beverly Hills when she was thirteen. She graduated from Beverly Hills High School in 1961, began her college education at Smith College in Massachusetts, and later transferred to the University of California, Los Angeles, where she earned a bachelor's degree in English in 1966.

Franklin's performing career began in childhood. At age nine she appeared on The Colgate Comedy Hour, and in 1954 she played Martha Cratchit in the Shower of Stars television adaptation of A Christmas Carol. At eleven she had an uncredited role in Alfred Hitchcock's 1956 film The Wrong Man, appearing alongside Tuesday Weld as one of two girls in an apartment doorway. During the 1960s she had a semi-regular role on the ABC series Gidget and guest-starred on The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and Hazel.

Franklin made her Broadway debut in 1970 in the musical Applause, a credit verified in theatrical records. Her performance earned her both a Tony Award nomination and a Theatre World Award that same year. Her recording of the show's title song became the most successful Broadway song of the season. In its July 1970 issue, Vogue featured Franklin alongside Melba Moore and Sandy Duncan in a photo spread predicting significant careers for all three women. She later appeared at the Paper Mill Playhouse in Millburn, New Jersey, in productions of George M! and A Thousand Clowns. From June through September 1973, she portrayed Carrie Pipperidge in a production of Carousel at the Jones Beach Theater on Long Island, sharing the stage with John Cullum and Barbara Meister.

Franklin became most widely recognized for her leading role as Ann Romano, a divorced mother, in the CBS situation comedy One Day at a Time, which ran for nine seasons from 1975 to 1984. The series, developed in part by Norman Lear, also starred Valerie Bertinelli and Mackenzie Phillips, and co-starred Pat Harrington Jr. as building superintendent Dwayne Schneider. Her work on the series brought her nominations for Emmy, Tony, and Golden Globe Awards. In April 2011, Franklin and fellow cast members accepted the Innovators Award from the TV Land cable channel, which recognized the series for addressing subjects including premarital sex, suicide, and sexual harassment. In 2005, she reunited with Bertinelli, Phillips, and Harrington for the CBS television special The One Day at a Time Reunion, and in 2011 she appeared alongside Bertinelli again on the series Hot in Cleveland, playing the mother of Bertinelli's character's boyfriend.

Beyond her Broadway debut and her television work, Franklin maintained an active stage career across several decades. In 1988 she played the title role in Annie Get Your Gun at the Bucks County Playhouse and the Pocono Playhouse in Pennsylvania, and that same year appeared with Tony Musante at the Westside Arts Theatre in Manhattan in Terrence McNally's Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune. In July 1998 she performed in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? at the Pittsburgh Public Theater, and in September 1999 she appeared at Ford's Theatre in Washington, D.C., in All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten. She also performed in cabaret at venues throughout New York City, including Le Mouches, Grand Finale, The Eighty-Eights, Triad, and The Oak Room at the Algonquin Hotel, as well as at Odette's in New Hope, Pennsylvania.

In 2001, Franklin co-founded Classic and Contemporary American Playwrights (CCAP) with her sister Judy, an organization through which she participated in staged readings across the Greater Los Angeles area during the mid and late 2000s. During the 2006–2007 season she appeared in Lillian Hellman's Toys in the Attic, and in January 2008 she performed in Neil Simon's Broadway Bound at the Pico Playhouse. In October 2011 she played Ouiser in Steel Magnolias at the Rubicon Theater in Ventura, California. She also directed episodes of the 1980s sitcom Charles in Charge and the syndicated series The Munsters Today. In August 2012, she appeared in several episodes of the daytime drama The Young and the Restless as Sister Celeste, a nun who assists the character Victor Newman. The following month, in September 2012, she was diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer.

Franklin was married twice. Her first marriage, to playwright Ronald Sossi, lasted from 1967 to 1970. In 1980 she married film producer Marvin Minoff, who had previously served as executive producer of the television movie Portrait of a Rebel: The Remarkable Mrs. Sanger, in which Franklin starred as Margaret Sanger. Minoff died on November 11, 2009, after twenty-nine years of marriage. Franklin had two stepchildren, Jed and Julie Minoff. She died on March 1, 2013, at her home in Los Angeles at the age of sixty-nine.