LYNN COHEN
(10 August 1933 - 14 February 2020)
Television viewers and filmgoers may well remember the American actress Lynn Cohen from her roles as the appalling Ukrainian housekeeper Magda in Sex and the City on TV (and in the cinema), and as Mags Flanagan in The Hunger Games: Catching Fire. However, the actress, who has died aged 86, appeared widely on television and in films as well as doing much theatre work, including Peter Hall’s production of Tennessee Williams’ Orpheus Descending with Vanessa Redgrave, and Chekhov’s Ivanov.
Born Lynn Harriette Kay in Kansas City, Cohen studied acting at the Michael Howard Studios in New York City where she began playing in off-Broadway productions from the 1970s but, apart from a small role in Without a Trace (1983), her first major film appearance was in Woody Allen’s 1993 comedy Manhattan Murder Mystery. This was followed by her playing Maman in Louis Malle’s Vanya on 42nd Street, Mary Harron’s I Shot Andy Warhol, Nicole Holofcener’s Walking and Talking and Sharon Pollack’s Everything Relative. Morgan J. Freeman directed her in Hurricane Streets, and then she was back with Woody Allen for Deconstructing Harry. Often called on to play mothers, she was the mother in Andrea Clark’s My Divorce and played more mothers in Dani Levi and Maria Schrader’s The Giraffe, Tim Robbins’ Cradle Will Rock, Ethan Hawke’s The Hottest State and later on she was Philip Seymour Hoffman’s mother in Synecdoche, New York. She played Grandmom in Enid Zentells’ Evergreen (2004) and another grandmother in Julie Taymor’s Across the Universe (2007). She also played Golda Meir, the Prime Minister of Israel, in Steven Spielberg’s Munich.
Other films in the 2000s included Invincible with Mark Wahlberg, Delirious with Steve Buscemi, Helen Hunt’s Then She Found Me with Colin Firth and Bette Midler, Deception with Hugh Jackman, Eagle Eye with Shia LaBeouf, Staten Island with Ethan Hawke, Everybody’s Fine with Robert De Niro, and The Extra Man with Kevin Kline. Among many other films Lynn Cohen was the star of The Romance of Loneliness, and she obviously made a great impression as Mags in The Hunger Games: Catching Fire in 2013. She then made another score of features over the next seven years before her death. In between her film career were TV shows such as NYPD Blue, Law and Order, Nurse Jackie, Damages, and others including, of course, thirteen episodes of Sex and the City plus the two feature films. Lynn Cohen made many short films in her time (there are still three in the can), while two more features, The Riverside Bench and Six Dinner Parties are in post-production. Lynn Cohen married Gilbert Frazen in 1957, but they divorced in 1963, having had one child. Her second husband, Ronald Cohen, survives her.
MICHAEL DARVELL