Bonnie Franklin, 69, star of TV sitcom

NEW YORK - Bonnie Franklin, 69, the pert, redheaded actress whom millions came to identify with for her role as divorced mom Ann Romano on the long-running sitcom One Day at a Time, died Friday at her home in Los Angeles due to complications from pancreatic cancer.

Ms. Franklin was a veteran stage and television performer before One Day At a Time made her a star.

Developed by Norman Lear and cocreated by Whitney Blake - herself a former sitcom star and single mother raising future actress Meredith Baxter - the series was groundbreaking for its focus on a young divorced mother seeking independence from a suffocating marriage.

It premiered on CBS in December 1975, just five years after the network had balked at having Mary Tyler Moore play a divorced woman on her own comedy series, insisting that newly single Mary Richards be portrayed as having ended her engagement instead.

On her own in Indianapolis, Ann Romano was raising two teenage girls - played by Mackenzie Phillips, already famous for the film American Graffiti, and a previously unknown Valerie Bertinelli.

One Day At a Time ran on CBS until 1984, by which time both daughters had grown and married, while Romano had remarried and become a grandmother. During the first seven of its nine seasons on the air, the show was a Top 20 hit.

Like other Lear productions such as All in the Family and Good Times, One Day at a Time dealt with contemporary issues once absent from TV comedies, such as premarital sex, birth control, suicide, and sexual harassment.

Meanwhile, the series weathered its own crises as Phillips was twice written out of the series to deal with her drug abuse and other personal problems.

Writing in her 2009 memoir High On Arrival, Phillips remembered Ms. Franklin as hardworking and professional, even a perfectionist.

"Bonnie felt a responsibility to the character and always gave a million notes on the scripts," Phillips wrote. "Above all, she didn't want it to be sitcom fluff - she wanted it to deal honestly with the struggles and truths of raising two teenagers as a single mother."

In her 2008 memoir Losing It, Bertinelli noted that Ms. Franklin, just 31 when the show began, wasn't old enough to be her real mother.

Even so, wrote Bertinelli, "within a few days I recognized her immense talent and felt privileged to work with her. . . . She was like a hip, younger complement to my real mom."

The truth of One Day at a Time was brought home to Ms. Franklin when in 2005 she got together with both TV daughters for a One Day at a Time reunion special. She told both actresses: "You are living, in a sense, Ann Romano's life - you are single parents raising teenage kids. That is shocking and terrifying to me."

Lear noted that despite tackling some serious subjects in her work, Ms. Franklin always stayed cheery and positive.

"I was wrong - I thought life forces never die. Bonnie was such a life force," Lear said in a statement. "Bubbly, always up, the smile never left her face."

Ms. Franklin herself was married for 29 years. Her husband, TV producer Marvin Minoff, died in 2009.

Born Bonnie Gail Franklin in Santa Monica, Calif., she entered show business at an early age. She was a child tap dancer and actress, and a protégé of Donald O'Connor, with whom she performed in the 1950s on NBC's Colgate Comedy Hour.