Virginia Capers, an actress and singer who won a Tony Award in 1974 for her role in ”Raisin,” the musical version of ”A Raisin in the Sun,” died on Thursday in Los Angeles. She was 78 and lived in Los Angeles.

She died after a bout of pneumonia, said her son, Glenn Capers.

Ms. Capers was an experienced but little-known character actress when she was cast as Lena Younger, the matriarch of the struggling working-class black family in ”Raisin,” a musical that opened in the fall of 1973, based on Lorraine Hansberry’s play. But Ms. Capers’s intense stage presence captivated critics. In his review for The New York Times, Clive Barnes called her ”a vast and loving Gibraltar of a woman” and said she was ”tremendous in just about every sense you can use the word.”

Ms. Capers won the Tony for best actress in a musical. The show, which also starred Deborah Allen, Ernestine Jackson and Joe Morton, was nominated for nine Tonys, and also won for best musical. It ran on Broadway for more than two years and had a long life as a touring show.

Eliza Virginia Capers was 𝐛𝐨𝐫𝐧 in Sumter, S.C., and attended Howard University and the Juilliard School. She began performing in Yiddish theater and by the late 1950’s had made her way to Broadway. She was an understudy for Adelaide Hall in ”Jamaica,” which opened in 1957, and in 1959 she was in the cast of ”Saratoga,” the Harold Arlen-Johnny Mercer musical.

Before ”Raisin,” Ms. Capers worked extensively in television and in the movies, appearing on ”The Untouchables,” ”Have Gun, Will Travel,” ”Mannix” and ”Dragnet,” among many other shows. In the 1972 film ”Lady Sings the Blues,” she played the mother to Diana Ross’s Billie Holiday, and she was also in ”Trouble Man” and ”The Lost Man.” After ”Raisin,” she appeared on the television shows ”Frank’s Place,” ”The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air” and ”The Hughleys.”

Besides her son, of Los Angeles, she is survived by a brother, James H. Capers, of New York.