Name	Frances Sternhagen
Height
Naionality	American
Date of Birth	13-January-1930
Place of Birth	Washington, D.C., U.S.
Famous for	Acting

Frances Sternhagen is an American actress. Sternhagen has appeared on and off Broadway, in movies, and on TV since the 1950s. Sternhagen started her career teaching acting, singing and dancing to school children at Milton Academy in Massachusetts, and she herself first performed in 1948 at a Bryn Mawr summer theater in The Glass Menagerie and Angel Street.

She went on to work at Washington's Arena Stage from 1953–54, then made her Broadway debut in 1955 as Miss T. Muse in The Skin of Our Teeth. The same year she had her Off-Broadway debut in "Thieves' Carnival" and her TV debut in "The Great Bank Robbery" on "Omnibus" (CBS). By the following year she had won an off-Broadway Obie Award for "Distinguished Performance (Actress)" in The Admirable Bashville (1955–56). She has won two Tony awards, for "Best Supporting Actress (Dramatic)": in 1974 for the original Broadway production of Neil Simon's The Good Doctor based on Chekhov stories (which also won her a Drama Desk Award for "Outstanding Featured Actress in a Play"); and in 1995 for the revival of The Heiress, based on the Henry James novella.

She has been nominated for Tony awards five other times, including for her roles in the original Broadway casts of Equus (1975) and On Golden Pond (1979), both later made into Oscar-nominated movies with other actresses, as well as for Lorraine Hansberry's The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window (1972), the musical Angel (1978) which was based on Thomas Wolfe's Look Homeward, Angel, and the 2002 revival of Paul Osborne's Morning's at Seven. Her best-known Off-Broadway role was her feisty portrayal of the title character in 1988's Pulitzer prize-winning drama Driving Miss Daisy which was originated by Dana Ivey at Playwrights Horizons in New York. Sternhagen took over the role after the show moved to the John Houseman Theatre and played it for more than two years. (Jessica Tandy later won an Academy Award playing Daisy in the 1989 movie.)