Groundhog Day actress Angela Paton dies aged 86

American actress Angela Paton has died aged 86.
The veteran star, best known for her role alongside Bill Murray in the iconic 1993 comedy Groundhog Day passed away, on Thursday (26May16) in an Oakland, California hospice, her nephew George Woolf tells the Associated Press. She had been admitted to the hospice after a recent heart attack.
In Groundhog Day Paton starred as Mrs. Lancaster, a kindly hotelier who played host to Murray’s character, Phil Connors, a misanthropic TV newsman forced to relive the same day repeatedly.
Over the course of her career Paton received 91 film and TV credits, with most coming in her later years as she carved out a niche playing elderly characters.
As well as Groundhog Day, Paton’s other notable roles included playing the grandmother of principal character Jim Levenstein in 2003’s American Pie franchise flick, American Wedding, and as summer camp director Mrs. Holmes in the 1997 screen adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Lolita.
Before gaining roles in the film and television industry, Paton had a long stage career in the San Francisco Bay Area, where she founded and ran the Berkeley Stage Company with her husband Bob Goldsby.
She is survived by Goldsby, an actor and stage director who also works as a professor in Berkeley, University of California’s dance and performance studies department.