Marsha Kramer, best known in recent years for playing Margaret on ABC’s Modern Family, has passed away. The 74-year-old actress had a lengthy career in the entertainment industry and did everything from Broadway to voice work to key supporting roles in sitcoms.
The news was first reported publicly by Modern Family director Jeff Greenberg, and it inspired a host of condolence messages from both fans and co-stars including Jesse Tyler Ferguson and Alex Winter who starred alongside her in Broadway’s Peter Pan back in 1979. She played Wendy and he played John Darling, while Sandy Duncan took the title role. You can see Jeff Greenberg’s message along with a lovely picture below…
Kramer picked up her first television credit on The Bill Cosby Show all the way back in 1970. In the time since, she appeared in scores of classic programs including The Waltons, Newhart, Cheers, Frasier, Touched By An Angel, Malcolm In The Middle, NCIS and most recently, Modern Family. On the latest, she appeared in 14 episodes between 2013 and 2020, all playing Jay’s assistant Margaret. Two of her recent appearances aired earlier this year, one of which dealt with the loss of Phil's father and one of which saw Kramer's Margaret come out of retirement briefly to work alongside Ariel Winter’s Alex Dunphy. She also acted extensively in plays in the Los Angeles area, frequently at the Ford Theater and alongside some of Hollywood's brightest including Zooey Deschanel and James Cromwell.
At this point, it’s unclear what the cause of death was. Details, as a whole, are still very fuzzy, but regardless, the world lost a wonderful actress and judging by the amount of well-wishers, a wonderful person. She will be missed.
In addition to her more front and center work in front of the camera, Marsha Kramer also spent much of her career doing ADR work and loop group voices. For those of you outside the industry, that’s basically the process movies and television shows use in order to make the audio sound as good as possible (seen here). Sometimes that means having the main cast re-record their dialogue, but it also often means contributing sounds like background conversations, voices heard offscreen, etc. In that capacity, Kramer worked on such movies as The Great Gatsby, Jumper, The Simpsons Movie, Double Jeopardy, What About Bob?, Antz and The Lego Movie.
Our thoughts go out to Kramer’s family, friends and all those who knew her during this difficult time.
