Madeline Kahn; Oscar-Nominated, Tony- and Emmy-Winning Actress

Madeline Kahn, an Oscar-nominated actress and comedian who was often called the funniest woman in America after a string of movie successes in the 1970s, including roles in “Blazing Saddles,” “Paper Moon” and “Young Frankenstein,” died Friday of ovarian cancer. She was 57.

Kahn had battled the disease for a year but acknowledged it publicly only last month--in an effort to heighten awareness of its dangers.

Although best remembered for her madcap heroines, she had a multifaceted career that ranged from Broadway to Hollywood, musicals to straight drama to roll-on-the-floor comedy.

She earned two Oscar nominations for best supporting actress for playing floozy Trixie Delight in the 1973 film “Paper Moon” and for her Marlene Dietrich parody in “Blazing Saddles” in 1974.

She won a Tony for best actress in 1993 with her performance as Jewish bimbo Gorgeous Teitelbaum in “The Sisters Rosensweig.”

Her other honors included Tony nominations for her work in “In the Boom Boom Room” in 1973, “On the 20th Century” in 1978 and “Born Yesterday” in 1989, and an Emmy Award for her role in an “ABC Afterschool Special” in 1987.

Most recently, she was Bill Cosby’s neighbor Pauline in the CBS sitcom “Cosby.”

Teri Garr, who appeared with Kahn in “Young Frankenstein,” said she was heartbroken to learn of the death. “I had no idea that she was this ill,” Garr said. “She was an incredibly talented woman--and magical. She had a light shining out of her eyes and a magnificent confidence and a good humor that penetrated everything.”

Kahn was born in Boston and raised in New York City. As a child, she was withdrawn and insecure but had a powerful imagination. Encouraged by her mother, a frustrated would-be actress and Bohemian, Kahn spent long hours spinning fantasies and acting them out, dreaming of herself as Cinderella and other Disney characters.

At her mother’s insistence, she got a drama scholarship to Hofstra University, where she trained as a speech therapist. She performed as a classical singer in Hofstra productions and joined an opera workshop.

She briefly taught public school in Levittown, N.Y., after graduating in 1964 but “didn’t like anything about it.” She soon redirected her energies into acting, earning her Actors Equity card as a chorus girl in a 1965 revival of “Kiss Me, Kate.”

Through the late 1960s and early 1970s, Kahn was regularly seen in revues at New York’s Upstairs at the Downstairs club and was introduced to a national television audience through appearances on the “Tonight Show” and other programs.

In 1972, she made her film debut in Peter Bogdanovich’s “What’s Up, Doc?” Although she initially feared performing in a cast dominated by Barbra Streisand, many critics agreed that she nearly stole the movie. As the frustrated fiancee of Ryan O’Neal’s character, “Miss Kahn, who has a voice that sounds as if it had been filtered through a ceramic nose, just about takes off with the movie,” wrote Vincent Canby in the New York Times.

A chance meeting with director Mel Brooks at the Warner Bros. commissary launched Kahn into the roles most associated with her career--from the dishy fiancee of Gene Wilder in “Young Frankenstein” to the Teutonic vixen in “Blazing Saddles.”

“She is one of the most talented people that ever lived,” Brooks once said. “I mean, either in stand-up comedy, or acting, or whatever you want, you can’t beat [her].”

But she did not perceive herself as a funny person. In contrast to her campy screen roles, she was a reserved, polite woman who lived in a book-strewn Park Avenue apartment and often thought she should have been a psychotherapist. But, she once mused, that contrast probably contributed to her success.

Brooks’ movies “relied on broad, gross, flat-out humor. And I am the antithesis of that,” she said. “You had these horribly outrageous guys and you had this proper woman. I think I am rather delicate and subtle. And for me to be in ‘Blazing Saddles,’ where there are a lot of those grotesque things, I think that’s why it was funny.”

When she landed a part in Joseph Papp’s 1973 production of the David Rabe play “In the Boom Boom Room,” Kahn felt validated as an actress, winning a Drama Desk Award for her work. But in the 1980s, she began to express some disappointment about the turns in her career that included many flops, such as a short-lived 1983 television series called “Oh Madeline.” She seemed resigned to her fate as a supporting actress.

When the role in “Cosby” came up a few years ago, Kahn snapped it up, attracted by the show’s message of blacks and whites in peaceful co-existence. Cast as the best friend and business partner of Cosby’s wife, she also was intrigued by the promise of a more free-flowing, improvisational production.

Executive producer Norman Steinberg praised Kahn as a factor in the sitcom’s popularity. “She has her own distinctive, quirky voice,” he said earlier, calling her a combination of Bernadette Peters, Beatrice Lillie and Hermione Gingold.

Exhausted by chemotherapy, Kahn took a leave of absence from “Cosby” last summer after taping four episodes of this season.

She leaves her husband, attorney John Hansbury, whom she wed in October, and brother Jeffrey Kahn.

“It is my hope that I might raise awareness of this awful disease and hasten the day that an effective test can be discovered to give women a fighting chance to catch this cancer in its earliest stage,” Kahn said in an October statement. She noted that 75% of cases are detected too late, as happened with friend Gilda Radner.

Times staff writer Susan King and Associated Press contributed to this story.