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2024-10-29 18:36:02 UTC
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PermalinkTeri Garr, Comic Actress in Offbeat Roles, Is Dead at 79
An Oscar nominee for her role in “Tootsie,” she was also a favorite guest
of David Letterman and Johnny Carson and a three-time host of “Saturday
Night Live.”
By Anita Gates
Oct. 29, 2024Updated 2:19 p.m. ET
Teri Garr, the alternately shy and sassy blond actress whose little-girl
voice, deadpan comic timing, expressive eyes and cinematic bravery in the
face of seemingly crazy male characters made her a star of 1970s and ’80s
movies and earned her an Oscar nomination for her role in “Tootsie,” died
on Tuesday at her home in Los Angeles. She was 79.
Her publicist, Heidi Schaeffer, who said the cause was complications of
multiple sclerosis.
Ms. Garr received that diagnosis in 1999, after 16 years of symptoms and
medical research, and made her condition public in 2002. In late 2006, she
had a ruptured brain aneurysm and was in a coma for several days, but she
was able to regain her ability to speak.
Onscreen, Ms. Garr’s outstanding features were her eyes, which could seem
simultaneously pained, baffled, sympathetic, vulnerable, intrigued and
determined, whether she was registering a grand new discovery or holding
back tears. If her best-known roles had a common thread, it was the
erratic behavior of the men in her characters’ lives.
In “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” she initially went into denial
when her husband (Richard Dreyfuss) became obsessed with U.F.O.s, but
promptly abandoned him, taking the children, when he built a mountain of
garbage, fencing and backyard soil in their family room. In “Oh, God!,”
she was supportive when her husband (John Denver), a California
supermarket manager, told everyone he was hanging out with God incarnate
(George Burns). In “Tootsie,” for which she earned a 1983 Academy Award
nomination for best supporting actress, she whined eloquently as the
neglected friend-turned-lover of an actor (Dustin Hoffman) who was
behaving strangely. It turned out he had been posing as a woman to get
better acting jobs.
In “Young Frankenstein,” in which she played a dim, cleavage-proud German
lab assistant, her character was involved with a mad scientist (Gene
Wilder). As a dive-bar waitress in “After Hours” (1985), she flirted with
a man (Griffin Dunne) on the verge of a breakdown.
Ms. Garr’s role in “Mr. Mom” (1983) was an exception. Her character was
the one who got carried away, becoming an overconfident ad-agency
workaholic while her unemployed husband (Michael Keaton) stayed home with
the children and the laundry.
While making many of these films, she noticed troubling physical symptoms.
She didn’t suspect their cause, but she remembered running in New York
City in the late 1990s. “When I was jogging, I would get this horrible
pain in my arm like a knife stabbing,” she told CNN in 2008. “And I
thought, well, I’m in Central Park — well, maybe it is a knife stabbing.”
It wasn’t.
On “The Larry King Show” in 2002, she was asked how she dealt with the
frustrations of multiple sclerosis, which affects the central nervous
system. “I switch gears,” she said. “If there’s something I can’t do, I do
something I can do.”
For years, she was a spokeswoman for MS research and support, continuing
to make appearances in her wheelchair. “I really do count my blessings,”
she wrote in a memoir, “Speedbumps: Flooring It Through Hollywood” (2005),
written with Henriette Mantel. “At least I used to. Now I get so tired I
have a woman come once a week and count them for me.”
Terry Ann Garr was born on Dec. 11, 1944, in Los Angeles, the youngest of
three children of Eddie Garr, an actor and vaudevillian born Edward
Gonnoud, and Phyllis (Lind) Garr, a former Rockette whose birth name was
Emma Schmotzer.
When Terry was 11, her father died. Her mother became a costumer for film
and television to support the family and pay for her daughter’s ballet
classes. Terry made her professional dance debut immediately following her
high school graduation in a Los Angeles stage production of “West Side
Story.”
At her mother’s insistence, she briefly attended California State
University, Northridge, in Los Angeles. But when she began to earn serious
money from television commercials, she left college. She was already
appearing in film, mostly in uncredited dancing roles; by the end of 1964
she had been in four Elvis Presley movies, including “Fun in Acapulco” and
“Viva Las Vegas".
Playing showgirls and go-go dancers was less satisfying than she had
hoped; she wanted to act. The 1960s brought two unusual film roles: as a
wayward teenager in “For Pete’s Sake” (1966), a religious film that
starred the Rev. Billy Graham as himself, and as an actress on the set of
a western in “Head” (1968), a psychedelic comedy starring the pop group
the Monkees.
One of Ms. Garr’s first solid roles was in an episode of “Star Trek”
(1968); she played a ditsy 20th-century secretary meeting time travelers
and witnessing futuristic technologies like voice-recognition printouts
and talking computers.
Viewers of “The Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour” soon got to know her as a
variety of characters in comedy sketches. In 1974, Francis Ford Coppola
cast her as Gene Hackman’s giggly but wary young girlfriend in “The
Conversation.”
Throughout the years, Ms. Garr had a recognizable television presence as a
favorite talk-show guest of both Johnny Carson and David Letterman and a
three-time host of “Saturday Night Live.” After her career peak, she
continued to appear both on TV and in film, often with notable directors,
shifting between drama and comedy. Two Robert Altman films, “The Player”
(1992) and “Ready to Wear” (1994), were followed by the Farrelly brothers’
“Dumb and Dumber” (1994). In Nora Ephron’s “Michael” (1996), she portrayed
a judge charmed by an irresistible angel (John Travolta). On three
episodes of NBC’s “Friends” (1997-98), she was the Lisa Kudrow character’s
long-lost birth mother.
In 1993, after almost two decades of playing wives and mothers, Ms. Garr
married John O’Neil, a contractor. They divorced in 1996.
Ms. Garr’s survivors include her daughter, Molly O’Neil, and a grandson.
Early in Ms. Garr’s career, a numerologist told her that having double
letters in both her first and last names was not propitious, so Terry
became Teri. “It was the best $35 I ever spent,” she declared.
Ms. Garr tended to be frank. Writing in The New York Times Magazine in
2006, she dismissed the adage about being nice to people on your way up
because you’d see them again on your way down.
“Not true, really,” she wrote. “I find that as I gently descend the ladder
of fame (the same one I viciously clawed my way up), I’m meeting an
entirely different set of people.”
Kellina Moore contributed reporting.