R.I.P. Lynne Marie Stewart, from It's Always Sunny and Pee-wee's Playhouse

William Hughes

Feb. 22, 2025, 1:22 p.m.

Lynne Marie Stewart has died. A veteran comic actress whose career stretched across more than 50 years of TV and film, Stewart will be best known to many for two memorable roles in landmark pieces of oddball TV comedy: The glamorous Miss Yvonne on Pee-wee’s Playhouse, and sweet doormat Bonnie Kelly—mother of Charlie—on It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia. Stewart’s death was announced on Friday evening by Cassandra Peterson, a long-time friend (and fellow member of comedy troupe The Groundlings) who often cast Stewart in her various Elvira productions. Stewart was 78.

Born in Los Angeles, Stewart began landing acting roles in the 1970s, appearing in numerous TV shows—including 5 different stints as differently named nurses on M*A*S*H, and several pop-ups on Laverne & Shirley with her close friend Cindy Williams. (In fact, Stewart took over Williams’ voice role as Shirley in the final season of the short-lived Laverne & Shirley animated series.) In the late ’70s, Stewart accepted a life-changing offer from theater director Gary Austin to take a class at his quickly ascendant Groundlings comedy theater; she would remain closely associated with both the theater, and the friends she made while performing there—most notably Pee-wee Herman creator Paul Reubens—for the rest of her life.

In the early 1980s, Stewart began working with Reubens on the stage production that would become The Pee-wee Herman Show, where she created and embodied the character of Miss Yvonne, “the most beautiful woman in Puppetland.” Dressed like a glammed-up child’s image of a ’50s housewife, and possessed of an endlessly sunny disposition—even while lobbing the show’s various innuendos, which were toned down, but not entirely removed, when it made the move to actual kids TV—Stewart provided a big dose of the heart necessary to Playhouse‘s success. She would remain a friend and collaborator of Reubens for the rest of his life, appearing in small roles in each of the Pee-wee movies, and reprising her turn as Miss Yvonne when he revived the original stage show on Broadway in 2010.

Stewart worked steadily through the 1990s and 2000s, often in small parts that required an explosive pop of personality—she played secretaries in a couple of big budget movies like Clear And Present Danger, but also carved out a role for herself as a cartoon voice actress, and a go-to player for Disney Channel productions. In 2005, she took what would turn out to be a momentous part: Playing the role of Bonnie Kelly, mother of the optimistically deranged Charlie, on It’s Always Sunny. It was a part that played perfectly to Stewart’s strengths: A surface level patina of normie suburban sweetness, steadily undercut by a reveal of layer after layer of strangeness. Stewart ultimately appeared in 18 episodes of the series, gamely taking on whatever increasing absurdities—faked sitcoms, lurid sexual descriptions, a faked cancer speech—the show could throw at her, and delivering them all with that signature blend of “doting mom” and “escaped mental patient.” Members of the Sunny cast issued their own tributes to Stewart today: Mary Elizabeth Ellis wrote about the joys of getting to know Stewart after watching her on Pee-wee’s as a child, while Charlie Day posted a tribute to “The brilliant and talented Lynne Marie Stewart. Rest in peace. Thank you for all the years of laughter.”