Her last Broadway appearance was in 1973, in the short-lived David Rabe play “In the Boom Boom Room,” as the mother of a go-go dancer played by Madeline Kahn.

Ms. Rae considered an Off Broadway production of Samuel Beckett’s play “Happy Days” in 1990 to be her career highlight — “like ‘Hamlet’ to a man,” she said, paraphrasing Peggy Ashcroft’s description of Ms. Rae’s joyously existential character, who is buried up to her neck in dirt.

“Miss Rae holds firmly to the author’s inclinations — the pauses, stops and starts and poetic lilt of language,’’ Mel Gussow of The New York Times wrote of Ms. Rae’s performance. “With an ebullience that seems to spring from conviction, she goes about her everyday life, undeterred by the fact of her entrapment.”

She continued performing into her 80s. She appeared in the Paper Mill Playhouse production of “Pippin” in 2000, in “The Vagina Monologues” Off Broadway in 2002, and in a concert version of the 1971 musical “70, Girls, 70” at City Center Encores! in 2006.

Onscreen, Ms. Rae appeared in the movie version of “Hair” in 1979; as an older woman who has an affair with Adam Sandler’s character in “You Don’t Mess With the Zohan” in 2008; and as the mother of Kevin Kline’s character in “Ricki and the Flash” in 2015.

She was married, from 1951 to 1975, to the composer and sound editor John Strauss, who often accompanied her on piano. Mr. Strauss (who wrote the theme song to “Car 54, Where Are You?,” among other works) died in 2011.

In her autobiography, “The Facts of My Life,” written with her son Larry and published in 2015, Ms. Rae said that both she and Mr. Strauss had struggled with alcoholism, and that after 25 years of marriage Mr. Strauss announced that he was bisexual and wanted an open relationship. They divorced, and Ms. Rae never remarried.