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Teri Garr, an actress known for classic comedies like “Tootsie” and “Young Frankenstein,” has died. She was 79.
Garr died early Tuesday in Los Angeles from multiple sclerosis, “peacefully surrounded by family and friends,” her publicist Heidi Schaeffer told The Daily News.
The offbeat performer was a steady presence in film and TV in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s until she was diagnosed with the illness. She spoken openly about living with MS for years before her official diagnosis and how the neurological disorder had slowed her career.
“I think now the good news is that there’s a lot of good medicines out there and options for people. So if I can just help people to feel better…” she told Larry King in a 2002 CNN interview.
Garr was born in Ohio on December 11, 1944, but graduated from high school and college in Los Angeles before heading to New York to study acting.
She got her start in show business as a dancer in several Elvis Presley movies, as well as bit parts on several of the era’s biggest sitcoms, like “Batman,” “The Andy Griffith Show” and “The Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour.”
Garr had her first speaking role in “Head,” the Monkees’ — and Jack Nicholson’s — salute to the counterculture. She also had a part in 1974’s Francis Ford Coppola’s thriller “The Conversation” before a star-making turn that same year in “Young Frankenstein” as Inga, assistant to Gene Wilder’s Dr. Frederick Frankenstein.
Later that decade, she played a wife frustrated with Richard Dreyfuss in Steven Spielberg’s “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.”
In the 1982 Dustin Hoffman-led gender-bender “Tootsie,” Garr played the titular actor’s neglected ex-girlfriend. The role earned her an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress.
Garr also co-starred alongside Michael Keaton in “Mr. Mom,” as a women who heads to the corporate world after her husband loses his job during a recession, and must fend off her boss’ lecherous advances.
Playing a beehive-coiffed waitress, she was one of the many impediments to Griffin Dunne’s attempt to get home in Martin Scorsese’s “After Hours.”
She also memorably guest starred on “Friends” as the estranged — and similarly quirky — mother of Lisa Kudrow’s Phoebe, to whom she bore a striking resemblance. Other TV credits included “M*A*S*H,” “The Odd Couple,” “The Bob Newhart Show” and “Felicity.”
In 2005, Garr published her autobiography, “Speedbumps: Flooring it Through Hollywood.”
Despite working with some of the biggest directors in Hollywood, like Mel Brooks, Sidney Pollack, Coppola, Spielberg and Scorsese, she was outspoken and frank about being frequently typecast as well as experiencing sexism and misogyny in the industry.
“If there’s ever a woman who’s smart, funny, or witty, people are afraid of that, so they don’t write that,” she lamented to the AV Club in 2008. “They only write parts for women where they let everything be steamrolled over them, where they let people wipe their feet all over them.”
Despite the ups-and-downs she experienced, Garr managed to keep her sense of humor.
“I think my career would have changed anyway at a certain age, but Hollywood’s very finicky about everyone being perfect,” she told Brain & Life magazine in 2005. “When things slowed down, it was either the MS or that I’m a stinking actress, so I chose to believe it’s the MS.”
She is survived by her daughter, Molly O’Neil, and grandson Tyryn — “whom she adored,” per Schaeffer.
With News Wire Services
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