Jean Stapleton - Telegraph Archie called Edith "Dingbat," and, as the magazine Newsweek put it, saw himself as "menaced by a rising tide of spades, spics, spooks, fairies, fruits, fags [and] four-eyes" - all species who offended his conception of Middle America. Having to cope with this was his warm-hearted wife Edith, some of whose traits Jean Stapleton said she took "from a beloved aunt who is now deceased" . Jean Stapleton was born Jeanne Murray on January 19 1923 in New York City, the daughter of an advertising salesman and his wife, a classical singer. After Wadleigh High School she took a secretarial course, but her heart was set on the stage. She attended acting classes, and from the mid-Forties worked with various theatre companies on the East Coast. Her break came in 1948, when she was cast in the Pulitzer Prize-winning play Harvey, which went on a four-month tour. By 1953 she was on Broadway, winning good notices for her performance in In the Summer House. She went on to appear in the hit musicals Damn Yankees (1955) and The Bells Are Ringing (1956) - later reprising her roles in the screen versions of both. Although she was cast in numerous television series - including Naked City, The Defenders and Dr Kildare - theatre was always Jean Stapleton's principal interest, and she was a fixture on the American stage in the Fifties and Sixties. In 1961 she was in the Broadway production of Ionesco's Rhinoceros; and in 1964 she was the first Mrs Strakosh in Funny Girl, alongside Barbra Streisand. After her success in All in the Family, Jean Stapleton gave a series of well-received performances off-Broadway, including in plays by John Osborne and Harold Pinter. She also played Eleanor Roosevelt in the 1982 television film Eleanor, First Lady of the World. On the big screen she had parts in Klute (1971), starring Jane Fonda and Donald Sutherland; You've Got Mail (1998), with Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan; and in Michael (1996), alongside John Travolta. She might have repeated her success as a television star had she not turned down the offer to star in Murder, She Wrote, the long-running series about a female detective. The part went instead to Angela Lansbury. Jean Stapleton's husband, the director William Putch, whom she married in 1957, died of a heart attack in 1983 aged 60. They had a son and a daughter. Jean Stapleton, born January 19 1923, died May 31 2013