Phyllis Newman, a Tony Award-winning actress who was a fixture of New York theater for more than a half-century, a familiar game show panelist and a fund-raiser on behalf of women in entertainment dealing with illness, died on Sunday at her home in Manhattan. She was 86.

Her death was confirmed by her daughter, Amanda Green.

Ms. Newman won a Tony in 1962 as best featured actress in a musical for “Subways Are for Sleeping,” whose book and lyrics were written by her husband, Adolph Green, and his regular collaborator, Betty Comden. In the show, Ms. Newman played a long-term resident of the Brunswick Arms who, to stave off eviction, has shut herself in her room, a role that required Ms. Newman to spend the play in an unusual costume.

“Her line is that she is sick,” Howard Taubman wrote of the character in his review in The New York Times, “and to prove it she wears a towel wrapped around her excellently appointed torso. The only addition to her costume all evening is a pair of black gloves.”

The musical ran for 205 performances, not an enduring hit but good enough to earn her the Tony over another emerging star, Barbra Streisand, who had been nominated in the same category for “I Can Get It for You Wholesale.”