The first television line Bunny Levine recalled delivering was five words long: "I think it's number two." Levine, the longtime New Jersey school librarian who later appeared in Thelma, Gilmore Girls and Everybody Loves Raymond, died on August 20, 2026, in Tarzana, California, at 97.

NBC Los Angeles reported that her representative confirmed her death. The same report noted that Levine was still auditioning in her 90s, a fitting final measure of a pursuit she had carried from childhood through retirement and deep into later life.

Raised in East Orange, New Jersey, Levine said she had performed from her earliest memory. She sang for her parents' friends and acted in school and local productions. Marriage brought her and Bernie Levine to Pullman, where he studied mathematics at Washington State College. She pursued English, dramatic arts and psychology, acted in campus theater and graduated in 1951. In a later interview with Washington State Magazine, she recalled that college had helped her see herself not as a conventional leading lady, but as a character actor.

Levine returned to New Jersey and spent more than two decades working as a school librarian. That career delayed professional acting, but it did not end the ambition. After retiring early, she entered community theater, took acting classes and began auditioning. The transition was not built around a single discovery. "I just plugged along, and I would go study and try to get better at my crafts," she told The Daily Evergreen in 2025.

Her recollection of Law & Order captured the scale of the work at first. She played a witness looking at a lineup, unsure whether the person she had seen was the second man. From that small speaking part, she kept going. In the 1990s, she began seeking work in Southern California, initially splitting time between coasts before settling in the Los Angeles acting market. Commercials, episodic television and film followed.

Levine understood exactly what her expressive face and comic timing brought to casting rooms. "I'm the old lady, often Jewish, with an edge and comic undertones," she told Washington State Magazine. The role names could be spare, but she made a career from giving those parts definition. In You Don't Mess with the Zohan, she was credited as Older Lady in Salon No. 3. On Community, she played Pierce's mother. Her television work also included Criminal Minds, Southland, 2 Broke Girls, New Girl, Raising Hope and Gilmore Girls.

The roles continued to accumulate rather than taper away. She appeared in You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah in 2023 and joined the cast of Thelma in 2024. By the time The Daily Evergreen profiled its alumna in March 2025, it counted more than 100 roles. Levine framed that unlikely second career with gratitude: "I feel very blessed to have been able to get back to what I had always wanted since early memory. I wish that everyone could find that happiness."

Levine's work forms a record of sustained attention to the small role: the lineup witness, the comic grandmother, the salon customer and the sharp older woman. Alongside those performances stand the New Jersey library career she completed first and the WSU education that kept theater in her life. The episodes and films remain, but so does the example of an actor who treated retirement as the beginning of her longest audition.