Lynne Marie Stewart
Lynne Marie Stewart is an actor, born 1946.
Miss Yvonne came first and Lynne Marie Stewart kept her for decades. She originated the Most Beautiful Woman in Puppet Land in the 1981 stage show The Pee-wee Herman Show, carried her through Pee-wee's Playhouse and its Christmas special, and was still playing her in the 2010 Los Angeles revival and the Broadway run at the Stephen Sondheim Theatre. Big Top Pee-wee gave her a different part entirely, Zelda the Bearded Lady, and she returned once more for Pee-wee's Big Holiday.
The voice she built for Miss Yvonne, all upward inflection and impossible sincerity, was a genuine comic invention, and it worked because Stewart played it completely straight. Nothing in the performance winks. That is harder than it looks on a set full of talking furniture.
Her second act was the opposite. From 2005 she recurred on It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia as Charlie's mother, delivering appalling things in a placid, pleasant register, and it introduced her to an audience with no idea she had been a children's television fixture. Everything else is a long line of one-scene parts spread across five decades: Bobbie in American Graffiti in 1973, a nurse on M*A*S*H, Edith Wiggins in The Running Man, a bartender in Elvira: Mistress of the Dark, Lillian's mother in Bridesmaids, Aunt Harriet in two animated Batman features, Livia in Other People. She died in 2025, with the documentary Pee-wee as Himself among her last credits and a film listed for 2026. Two indelible characters and a hundred small ones is a good ledger.
Movies (23)
- The Dink (2026)
- Bridesmaids (2011)
- The 'Burbs (1989)
- The Running Man (1987)
- American Graffiti (1973)
- Enough (2002)
- Elvira: Mistress of the Dark (1988)
- Jumpin' Jack Flash (1986)
- Other People (2016)
- Dunston Checks In (1996)
- Batman vs. Two-Face (2017)
- Guinevere (1999)
- Moving (1988)
- Young Doctors in Love (1982)
- Big Top Pee-wee (1988)
- Pee-wee's Big Holiday (2016)
- Double Trouble (1992)
- Children of a Lesser God (1986)
- Batman: Return of the Caped Crusaders (2016)
- Drive, He Said (1971)
- Tracey Ullman in the Trailer Tales (2003)
- Judy Toll: The Funniest Woman You've Never Heard Of (2007)
- Pee-wee's Playhouse Christmas Special (1988)
TV (9)
Where to start with Lynne Marie Stewart
Two roles, two entirely different comic instruments, and you want both. Pee-wee's Playhouse is the first: Miss Yvonne is a cartoon of femininity performed with total commitment, and the show around her is still the strangest thing ever aimed at Saturday-morning children. Then jump forty years to It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, where the same actress plays Charlie's mother with a serenity that makes the material land twice as hard. Big Top Pee-wee is worth a look for the bearded lady, a reminder that she was a character actress before she was an icon. Among the films, American Graffiti has her early and briefly, Bridesmaids has her late and briefly, and Other People gives her something with real feeling in it. Pee-wee as Himself is the coda.