Later work included perhaps her best known role, as Beverly Harris, mother of the title character, on the sitcom Roseanne, and, later, on its spinoff The Conners.

In 1964, Parsons won an Obie Award for Best Actress for her performance in two Off-Broadway plays, Next Time I'll Sing to You and In the Summer House.

In 1967, she starred with Stacy Keach in the premiere of Joseph Heller's play We Bombed in New Haven at the Yale Repertory Theatre.

[citation needed] In 1979, Parsons directed a production of Antony and Cleopatra at Interart Theatre in New York in which she incorporated some Spanish into the show, prompting Joseph Papp to invite her to direct at the New York Shakespeare Festival (now The Public Theatre), and becoming the first woman to do so.

[8] In 2016, she starred in Israel Horovitz's new play Out Of The Mouths Of Babes along with Judith Ivey directed by Barnet Kellman at The Cherry Lane Theater in New York City.

She received a BAFTA Award nomination for her role in Watermelon Man (1970), and appeared in I Never Sang for My Father (1970), Two People (1973), A Memory of Two Mondays (1974), For Pete's Sake (1974), Dick Tracy (1990) and Boys on the Side (1995).

Other television credits include appearances in The Patty Duke Show, Love, American Style, All In The Family, Archie Bunker's Place, Open Admissions, Frasier, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, and The Good Wife, as well as The UFO Incident: The Story of Betty and Barney Hill and the PBS production of June Moon.

[11] In 2010, she appeared in London, playing psychic Helga ten Dorp in Deathtrap at the Noël Coward Theatre in the West End.

[5] Her grandson Eben Britton, Abbie's son, is a former player for the Chicago Bears and Jacksonville Jaguars as a guard/tackle, and who was named for his great-grandfather, Estelle's father.