Rosemary Murphy | Award-winning actress, 89

Rosemary Murphy, 89, a Broadway and film actress known for her role in

To Kill a Mockingbird

and for her Emmy-winning performance in the television drama

Eleanor and Franklin

, died Saturday at home in New York, said her agent, Jonathan Mason. She had been diagnosed in June with esophageal cancer.

In the 1962 classic To Kill a Mockingbird, Ms. Murphy played the sympathetic part of Miss Maudie Atkinson, neighbor to lawyer Atticus Finch.

Her Southern accent as Miss Maudie masked the fact that Ms. Murphy was born in Munich, Germany (the exact date varies in sources), where her father, Robert, was with the U.S. Foreign Service. She grew up in that country and elsewhere in Europe before settling in the United States in the late 1930s.

In 1976's Eleanor and Franklin, Ms. Murphy played Sara Roosevelt, the iron-willed mother of FDR. She worked through the 1990s on TV, appearing in several movies and in Frasier and other series. - Los Angeles Times