Jan Maxwell

Jan Maxwell, born Janice Elaine Maxwell on November 20, 1956, in Fargo, North Dakota, was an American stage and television actress whose Broadway career spanned more than three decades, from 1981 to 2011. She died on February 11, 2018, at her Manhattan apartment from leptomeningeal carcinomatosis complicated by breast cancer, at the age of 61. The fifth of six children, Maxwell was born to Ralph B. Maxwell, who served as a First District Judge in North Dakota from 1967 to 1978, and Elizabeth "Liz" Maxwell (née Fargusson; 1926–2015), who later worked as a lawyer for the EPA. She attended West Fargo High School in West Fargo, North Dakota, where she played the lead role of Calamity Jane in the 1973 school production of Deadwood Dick. She went on to study at the University of Utah and Moorhead State University.

Maxwell made her Broadway debut in 1989 as an understudy in the Cy Coleman and David Zippel musical City of Angels, eventually taking over the dual roles of Carla Haywood and Alaura Kingsley. She appeared in Brian Friel's Dancing at Lughnasa in 1992, replacing original cast member Brid Brennan in the role of Agnes in a production that won the Tony Award for Best Play. In 1997, she appeared in A Doll's House opposite Janet McTeer, and the following year played Elsa Schraeder in the first Broadway revival of Rodgers and Hammerstein's The Sound of Music. She then appeared alongside John Ritter and Henry Winkler in Neil Simon's The Dinner Party in 2000, and in 2004 joined Judd Hirsch and Martha Plimpton in Sixteen Wounded.

Maxwell received her first Tony Award nomination in 2005 for Best Featured Actress in a Musical for her portrayal of Baroness Bomburst in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, a role for which she also won the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Featured Actress in a Musical. Her second Tony nomination came in 2007 for Best Featured Actress in a Play for her role as Mrs. Lynch in Helen Edmundson's Coram Boy at the Imperial Theatre. She appeared as Julie Cavendish in the Broadway revival of The Royal Family at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre in late 2009, winning the 2010 Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Actress in a Play for that performance. In 2010, Maxwell also starred as Maria in the Broadway revival of Lend Me a Tenor at the Music Box Theatre, winning the Outer Critics Circle Award for Outstanding Featured Actress in a Play. Her Tony nominations for both The Royal Family and Lend Me a Tenor in the same year made her only the fourth actress to receive two nominations in a single Tony Award cycle.

Maxwell played Phyllis Rogers Stone in the Stephen Sondheim and James Goldman musical Follies, first at the Kennedy Center's Eisenhower Theater in Washington, D.C., from May 7 to June 19, 2011, alongside Bernadette Peters, Elaine Paige, Ron Raines, and Danny Burstein. The production transferred to Broadway's Marquis Theatre, running from August 2011 through January 22, 2012, and Maxwell reprised the role again in the production's subsequent engagement at the Ahmanson Theatre in Los Angeles from May 3 to June 9, 2012. On October 29, 2011, following a Saturday matinee, she was struck by a minivan, fracturing her fibula and sustaining injuries to her arm and leg; she missed two performances before returning to the show. Her Tony nomination for Follies was her fifth overall, making her only the second actress after Angela Lansbury to receive nominations in all four acting categories. She also received Helen Hayes, Fred Astaire, Drama League, Outer Critics Circle, and Drama Desk nominations for the role.

Beyond Broadway, Maxwell maintained an active Off-Broadway and regional career. Her Off-Broadway credits include The Seagull at the Kennedy Center in 1985, House and Garden at Manhattan Theatre Club in 2002, A Bad Friend at the Newhouse Theater at Lincoln Center in 2003, and a 2004 appearance at Carnegie Hall in the Stephen Sondheim concert Opening Doors. She appeared with the Potomac Theatre Project in Howard Barker's Scenes from an Execution in 2008, receiving Drama Desk and NYITT nominations, and later in Barker's Victory: Choices in Reaction in 2011 and The Castle: A Triumph in 2013. She appeared in the Off-Broadway production of Anthony Giardina's The City of Conversation at Lincoln Center's Mitzi Newhouse Theater from May to July 2014, earning nominations from the Lucille Lortel Awards, Outer Critics Circle, Drama Desk, and Drama League. In a July 2016 interview with Time Out New York, Maxwell announced her retirement from theatre.

On television, Maxwell made four guest appearances on the NBC drama Law and Order between 1994 and 2003, each time playing a different character. Her other television credits include Gossip Girl from 2009 to 2011, The Good Wife in 2014, The Divide in 2014, Neil LaBute's Billy and Billie from 2014 to 2015, season three of Madam Secretary in 2016, and a recurring role as a scheming senator in the CBS series BrainDead alongside Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Aaron Tveit, and Tony Shalhoub, which aired from June to September 2016. She also appeared in the film I Am Michael with James Franco. Additionally, Maxwell worked as a voice actress, recording audio books including Mary Higgins Clark's Two Little Girls in Blue and No Place Like Home. She was married to actor and playwright Robert Emmet Lunney, and they had a son, William Maxwell-Lunney.