Ms. Stenborg was born on Jan. 24, 1925, in Minneapolis, MN, the daughter of Ambrose Stenborg, a dentist and his wife, Ida. After completing high school early, at the age of 17, a month after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, she moved to New York to begin her career as an actress. During that time, she lived in the Barbizon Hotel for Women and studied with Miss Francis Robinson Duff, a respected acting teacher of the day. As a teenager, she performed in the national tours of the comedies Three's a Family and Claudia.
She met her future husband, the late actor Barnard Hughes, while rehearsing a veteran's hospital show in 1946. In the 1950s, they performed together in The Tenthouse Theater, a stock company that divided its time between Chicago and Palm Springs, where the couple was married in April 1950.
In 1999 she performed on Broadway with her husband in Noel Coward's Waiting in the Wings in a production that starred Lauren Bacall and Rosemary Harris. She was nominated for the Tony Award for Best Supporting Actress for her performance as the pyromaniac Sarita Myrtle.
Other Broadway appearances include the Roundabout Theatre Company production of A Month in the Country starring Helen Mirren and Hugh Leonard's A Life. She toured with her husband in the national company of Leonard's Tony Award-winning Da, the play for which Hughes had won the 1978 Tony Award for Best Actor in a Play. Her last Broadway performance was in 2002 as Rebecca Nurse in The Crucible with Liam Neeson and Laura Linney.
In September 2010, at the age of 84, Ms. Stenborg appeared in Morris Panych's Vigil with Malcolm Gets at the DR 2 Theatre in Manhattan, winning The Richard Seff Award for the best performance by a veteran female character actress in a supporting role.
