Actress-Singer Alaina Reed-Amini Dies at 63.

Alaina Reed-Amini, an actress and singer best known for a long-running role on the children’s television series Sesame Street, and the sitcom 227, died December 17, 2009, in Santa Monica, Calif. She was 63. The cause of death was cancer. According to news reports.

Prior to a 2008 marriage to Tamim Amini, she was known as Alaina Reed Hall or Alaina Reed. When she first appeared on Sesame Street, in 1976, she was already an experienced cabaret singer and musical theater performer. She played Olivia, a photographer whose brother, Gordon, played by Roscoe Orman, was already a character on the show.

She stayed with Sesame Street until 1988; she often performed in skits with Orman that imparted lessons about sibling relationships. She also sang, either solo or with her Sesame Street neighbors, both human and puppet.

In 1985, Reed-Amini was cast in the urban comedy 227, which starred Marla Gibbs. While working on 227 she met and married a fellow cast member, Kevin Peter Hall — their characters married on the show as well. Hall died in 1991.

She was born Bernice Reed on November 10, 1946, in Springfield, Ohio, and attended Kent State University. She had already adopted the name Alaina Reed when she began singing in New York nightclubs in the early 1970s.

She appeared in musical theater pieces, including Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band on the Road, an adaptation of the Beatles’ album, and William Finn’s In Trousers, the first of a trilogy of plays about a young gay man named Marvin. (Parts two and three became the Broadway musical Falsettos.) On Broadway, she appeared as a replacement cast member in the original Chicago, the 1977 revival of Hair and Eubie!

Reed-Amini appeared on numerous television series, including A Different World, Ally McBeal, Friends, The Drew Carey Show and E.R. Her feature films credits included Death Becomes Her and Cruel Intentions.

Her first marriage ended in divorce. Her survivors include her husband.