Kathryn Joosten, the Emmy Award-winning actress best known for playing Mrs McCluskey in Desperate Housewives and Mrs Landingham in The West Wing, has died after a long battle with lung cancer. She was 72.
The Los Angeles Times reports that Joosten passed away at her home in Westlake Village, California on Saturday.
An advocate for lung cancer awareness and research, Joosten agreed to the Desperate Housewives plot which saw her screen character also battle the illness.
Joosten had been a smoker but stopped smoking after her first diagnosis.
Last autumn she wrote as a "two-time lung cancer survivor" in the Los Angeles Times.
"My first was in 2001 and my second was in 2009, two completely different lung cancers, one on each side. I am the only 'celebrity' to be public about my lung cancer," she said.
"So far, I am a cancer survivor, but cancer will be with me for the rest of my life, be it as a nodule, tumour or cell someplace, or in my fears and anxieties. Therefore I've decided that I am 'living with cancer'."
After working as a psychiatric nurse, Joosten became a housewife and only began to follow her dream of an acting career when she was a 42-year-old divorcee.
After roles in community theatre and a year working in Disney World, she moved to Hollywood without an agent in 1995 and also went on to appear in such series as Dharma & Greg, Ally McBeal, Scrubs, My Name Is Earl and Joan of Arcadia and the films Wedding Crashers and Hostage.
Joosten said her mother's regrets had inspired her to pursue her own acting career.
She told the Oklahoman newspaper: "She was very angry when she died, because she had literally put off so many things she wanted to do... That was a huge lesson for me. I didn't want to get to the end of my life thinking, 'Gosh, if I had only tried'."
