Jean Stapleton, who played TV’s Edith Bunker, dead at 90

She earned three Emmy Awards starring as the wife of Carroll O’Connor’s loud-mouthed, bigoted Archie Bunker on the show, which marked the beginning of sitcoms as a forum for political — albeit often comical — family warfare.

As Edith, Stapleton became a role model for other women who had to deal with their own hotheaded Archies, a fact that O’Connor relished.

“Before Edith ... women who lived with fellows like Archie were usually submissive and suffering in the face of roaring nonthink,” O’Connor later wrote of his on-camera wife. “After Edith, they confronted nonthink a little more sternly and stiffly and gave hint of a serious readiness to rebel, just as Edith rebelled from time to time.”

On Saturday, series creator Norman Lear said in a statement: “No one gave more profound ‘How to be a Human Being’ lessons than Jean Stapleton. Goodbye, Edith darling.”

Eventually even Archie showed some growth on the show. He refrained from regularly calling his wife “dingbat,” and, although he remained prejudiced, he learned to curb his remarks in public.

Stapleton bowed out of the role in the 1980 season, and Edith was written out during the less popular spinoff Archie Bunker’s Place as having died of a stroke. Archie was left to mourn and carry on; Archie Bunker’s Place continued until 1983. All in the Family also spawned two other spinoffs: Maude and The Jeffersons.

As fans of All of the Family observed week after week, Archie’s fruitless attempts to get his wife to “stifle yourself” and his many labels for “women’s libbers,” people of colour and homosexuals only accentuated his powerlessness in a world that no longer acknowledged guys like him as kings of the hill.

He couldn’t escape the evidence anywhere, least of all in his home, where daughter Gloria, played by Sally Struthers, and her new husband, Mike, a.k.a. “Meathead,” portrayed by Rob Reiner, lived with the Bunkers. Arguments erupted, often requiring the intervention of the simple but sensible Edith.

In the opening to the show, Archie and Edith are at the piano in their home in New York City’s Queens borough. They alternate singing the lines to “Those Were the Days.” The song ends with Edith reaching a comic screech of warped notes that required real acting from Stapleton, who was a singer before she was an actress.

Edith’s obvious if sometimes puzzling affection for Archie allowed the show to shine a light on the ways that people divide themselves from each other.

“To unmask all those prejudices and be able to laugh at (them) was a great healer,” Stapleton said of All in the Family more than 20 years after leaving her role as Edith.

Born Jeanne Murray in New York on Jan. 19, 1923, Stapleton was the daughter of a billboard advertising salesman and an opera singer.

Stapleton married William H. Putch in 1957. Putch died of a heart attack at 59 in 1983 while they were touring with a play he directed. She went onstage in Syracuse, N.Y., that night and continued with the tour.

Her All in the Family husband, O’Connor, died in 2001.

She is survived by her daughter, Pamela Putch, a television producer, and her son, John Putch, a film and television director