Frances Sternhagen, the Tony Award-winning actress who 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 Dec. 4 in New Rochelle, NY. She was 93.

Miss Sternhagen won Tonys as featured actress in a play for her performances in two widely diverse 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.

On television, she played the controlling working-class mother of the oddball postal carrier Cliff Clavin on “Cheers,” and was Dr. John Carter’s aristocratic Chicago grandmother on “ER,” among other maternal figures in memorable hit series. She continued working into her 80s, playing her final film role in “And So It Goes” (2014), a comic drama in which she played a wise, snarky and chain-smoking real estate agent.