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.
The offbeat performer was a steady presence in film and TV in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s until she was diagnosed with the illness in 1999, speaking openly about living with MS for years before her official diagnosis and how the neurological disorder had slowed her career.
Garr was born in Ohio on December 11, 1947, 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” and “The Andy Griffith Show.”
Garr had her first speaking role in “Head,” the Monkees’ — and Jack Nicholson’s — salute to the counterculture. She also had a part in Francis Ford Coppola’s thriller “The Conversation” before a star-making turn in “Young Frankenstein” as Inga, Dr. Frederick Frankenstein (Gene Wilder)’s assistant.
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.
Garr also co-starred alongside Michael Keaton in “Mr. Mom,” as
She was one of the many impediments to Griffin Dunne’s attempt to go home as a beehive-coiffed waitress in Martin Scorsese’s “After Hours.”
She also memorably guest starred on Friends as the 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.”
Despite working with some of the biggest directors in Hollywood, like Mel Brooks, Sidney Pollack, Coppola, Spielberg, Scorsese and Robert Altman (“The Player, as herself) she was outspoken and frank about being 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 a the ups-and-downs she experienced, she 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.