LOS ANGELES — Teri Garr, the comedic actress known for her quirky roles in films like Young Frankenstein and Tootsie, has passed away. She was 79.
Garr died on Tuesday due to complications from multiple sclerosis, surrounded by family and friends, according to her publicist Heidi Schaeffer. Garr had faced several health challenges in recent years, including an aneurysm repair surgery in January 2007.
Tributes poured in on social media, with [REDACTED] calling her “truly one of my comedy heroes. I couldn’t have loved her more” and [REDACTED] saying: “Never the star, but always shining. She made everything she was in better.”
The actress, sometimes credited as Terri, Terry, or Terry Ann throughout her career, seemed destined for the entertainment world from a young age.
Her father, Eddie Garr, was a renowned vaudeville comedian, and her mother, Phyllis Lind, was one of the original Rockettes at Radio City Music Hall in New York. Their daughter began dance lessons at the age of six and by 14 was dancing with the San Francisco and Los Angeles ballet companies.
She was 16 when she joined the touring company of West Side Story in Los Angeles, and as early as 1963, she started appearing in small roles in films.
In a 1988 interview, she recalled how she secured the role in West Side Story. After being rejected in her initial audition, she returned the next day in different clothes and was accepted.
From there, Garr found consistent work as a dancer in movies, appearing in the chorus of nine Elvis Presley films, including Viva Las Vegas, Roustabout, and Clambake.
She also made appearances on numerous television shows, including Star Trek, Dr. Kildare, and Batman, and was a featured dancer on the rock ’n’ roll music show Shindig, the rock concert performance T.A.M.I., and a cast member of The Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour.
Her big break in film came in 1974’s Francis Ford Coppola thriller The Conversation, where she played Gene Hackman’s girlfriend. This led to an interview with Mel Brooks, who offered her the role of Gene Wilder’s German lab assistant in 1974’s Young Frankenstein, on one condition: she had to be able to speak with a German accent.
“Cher had this German woman, Renata, making wigs, so I got the accent from her,” Garr once shared.
The film cemented her as a talented comedic performer, with New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael declaring her “the funniest neurotic dizzy dame on the screen.”
Her bright smile and offbeat charm helped her land roles in films like Oh, God! opposite George Burns and John Denver, Mr. Mom (playing Michael Keaton’s wife), and Tootsie, where she portrayed the girlfriend who loses Dustin Hoffman to Jessica Lange and learns he has disguised himself as a woman to revive his career. (She also lost the supporting actress Oscar at that year’s Academy Awards to Lange.)
While best known for her comedy, Garr demonstrated in films like Close Encounters of the Third Kind, The Black Stallion, and The Escape Artist that she could handle drama equally well.
“I would like to play Norma Rae and Sophie’s Choice, but I never got the chance,” she once remarked, adding that she had become typecast as a comedic actress.
She possessed a talent for spontaneous humor, often playing David Letterman’s foil during guest appearances on NBC’s Late Night With David Letterman early in its run.
Her appearances became so frequent, and their good-natured bickering so convincing, that rumors of a romantic relationship between them began to circulate. Years later, Letterman credited those early appearances with helping make the show a hit.
It was during this time that Garr began to experience a “little beeping or ticking” in her right leg. It started in 1983 and eventually spread to her right arm, but she initially believed she could manage it. By 1999, the symptoms had become so severe that she sought medical advice. The diagnosis: multiple sclerosis.
Garr kept her illness private for three years.
“I was afraid that I wouldn’t get work,” she explained in a 2003 interview. “People hear MS and think, ‘Oh, my God, the person has two days to live.’”
After going public with her diagnosis, she became a spokesperson for the National Multiple Sclerosis Society, delivering humorous speeches at events across the US and Canada.
“You have to find your center and roll with the punches because that’s a hard thing to do: to have people pity you,” she commented in 2005. “Just trying to explain to people that I’m OK is tiresome.”
She also continued acting, appearing on shows like Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, Greetings From Tucson, Life With Bonnie, and others. She had a brief recurring role on Friends in the 1990s as Lisa Kudrow’s mother. Garr married contractor John O’Neil in 1993. They adopted a daughter, Molly, before divorcing in 1996.
In her 2005 autobiography, Speedbumps: Flooring It Through Hollywood, Garr explained her decision to avoid disclosing her age.
“My mother taught me that showbiz people never tell their real ages. She never revealed hers or my father’s,” she wrote.
She mentioned being born in Los Angeles, although most reference books list Lakewood, Ohio as her birthplace. As her father’s career declined, the family, including Teri’s two older brothers, lived with relatives in the Midwest and East.
The Garrs eventually returned to California, settling in the San Fernando Valley, where Teri graduated from North Hollywood High School and studied speech and drama for two years at California State University, Northridge.
Garr recalled in 1988 what her father had advised his children about pursuing a career in Hollywood.
“Don’t be in this business,” he told them. “It’s the lowest. It’s humiliating to people.”
Garr is survived by her daughter, Molly O’Neil, and a grandson, Tyryn.
—Bob Thomas, a longtime Associated Press journalist who died in 2014, was the principal writer of this obituary. AP entertainment writer Mark Kennedy contributed to this report.