Tammy Grimes, the throaty actress and singer who conquered Broadway at the age of 26, winning a Tony Award for her performance in “The Unsinkable Molly Brown,” and went on to a distinguished stage career, died on Sunday in Englewood, N.J. She was 82.

The death was confirmed by Duncan MacArthur, her nephew.

Ms. Grimes was largely unknown in 1960 when she was cast as Molly, the rags-to-riches turn-of-the-century socialite-philanthropist who survived the sinking of the Titanic. The show’s producers, who clearly considered the music and lyrics by Meredith Willson more marketable than their female lead, declined to put her name above the title, which meant that (because of the Tony regulations of the time) she could be nominated only in the featured-actress category.

Her second Tony, for a 1969 revival of Noël Coward’s “Private Lives,” was decidedly for lead actress. Clive Barnes, writing in The New York Times, called Ms. Grimes’s interpretation of her character, the reluctant 1930s divorcée Amanda Prynne, “outrageously appealing” and “so ridiculously artificial that she just has to be for real.”

Coward was a major influence on Ms. Grimes’s career. In 1958, he saw her performing at the Manhattan nightclub Downstairs at the Upstairs and cast her as the lead in “Look After Lulu,” a new comedy he had adapted from a Feydeau farce. In 1964 she appeared in “High Spirits,” a musical version of Coward’s “Blithe Spirit” (directed but not written by Coward), playing the ghost of the leading man’s first wife. The cast included Beatrice Lillie as a medium trying to summon her and Edward Woodward as the husband. It was one of more than a dozen Broadway productions in which Ms. Grimes starred.