Sex and the City star dies of natural causes as family share emotional statement

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Sex and the City actress Frances Sternhagen has passed away aged 93.

The TV star died peacefully of natural causes, according to her family. A statement issued on Wednesday (November 29). by her loved ones read: "We continue to be inspired by her love and life."

Sternhagen was best known for her role as Charlotte York's insufferable mother-in-law Bunny MacDougal in Sex and the City from 2000 until 2002.

The acting legend also earned two Tony Award for Best Supporting Actress (Dramatic) in 1974 for the original Broadway production of Neil Simon's The Good Doctor and in 1995 for the revival of The Heiress. She played Esther Clavin on NBC’s Cheers. Performances for which she received Emmy nominations.

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"“I must say it’s fun to play these snobby older ladies," Sternhagen revealed during a 2002 interview with the Los Angeles Times. She continued: "It’s always more fun to be obnoxious. I have known women like that, and I can imitate them, I guess."

Sternberger debuted as Esther on the fifth season of Cheers as the mother of the postman Cliff, played by John Ratzenberger. The character, like her son, had a knack for spouting obscure trivia facts. In Sex and the City, she played the role of Bunny the mother of Kyle MacLachlan's character Trey.

Her motherly, over-protectiveness put her at odds with Trey's new bride, Charlotte, played by series star Kristin Davis. She also played leading roles in stage productions of Driving Miss Daisy and On Golden Pond as formidable older women when she was so young that she had to wear aging makeup, died on Monday at her home in New Rochelle, N.Y. She was 93.

Sternhagen won Tonys as featured actress in a play for her performances in two very different productions. In a 1995 Broadway revival of “The Heiress,” based on Henry James’s novel “Washington Square,” she was Cherry Jones’s well-meaning, matchmaking Aunt Lavinia. In “The Good Doctor,” Neil Simon’s 1973 take on Chekhov, she played multiple roles in comedy sketches.

The acting legend came into her own in mature Off Broadway roles: as the strong-willed 70-something-and-up Southern widow in Alfred Uhry’s Driving Miss Daisy in 1988, when she was still in her 50s, and the concerned retirement-age wife in Ernest Thompson’s “On Golden Pond” in 1979, when she was 49.

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She received Tony nominations for her roles in the original productions of On Golden Pond, Equus and the musical Angel and in revivals of Morning’s at Seve and The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window.

According to The New York Times, Sternhagen was known to turn down movie roles because they would take her away from her family for too long, but over the years she did appear in some two dozen films. She was Burt Reynolds’s intensely caring sister-in-law in Starting Over , a perfectionist magazine researcher in Bright Lights, Big City and the cookbook author Irma Rombauer in Julie & Julia. Her other films included The Hospital, Independence Day and Misery.

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