©Courtesy of Universal 

Teri Garr, the Oscar-nominated actress and singer known for her many comedic roles in films and on television, died on Tuesday in Los Angeles. The 79-year-old performer had suffered from multiple sclerosis for more than twenty years. In her later life, she became an advocate for those suffering from MS.

A prolific actress, Garr appeared in dozens of television shows and films from the 1970s onward. She was especially known for her performances in Tootsie, for which she garnered an Oscar nomination, and in Young Frankenstein. She also hosted Saturday Night Live three times and appeared often on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson and on Late Night With David Letterman.

Teri Garr was born in Ohio in 1944 and spent a few years in Los Angeles before moving to New York City to study acting. She appeared as an extra in a few Elvis Presley movies and in the 1960s had a few bit parts on television sitcoms including That Girl, Batman, and The Andy Griffith Show. Her later television roles included appearances on Friends, M*A*S*H, The Odd Couple, and The Bob Newhart Show. She was regularly seen as a singer/dancer on The Sonny and Cher Show before landing a role in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation. Coppola later cast her in One From the Heart. She also worked under director Martin Scorsese in After Hours and under Robert Altman in The Player.

Her breakout role came when she played the flirtatious Inga in Mel Brooks’s 1974 spoof film, Young Frankenstein, greeting Gene Wilder’s Dr. Frederick Frankenstein by uttering the line, “Vould you like to have a roll in ze hay?”

Garr captured an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress for her role starring opposite Dustin Hoffman in Sydney Pollack’s Tootsie. She also played a working mother in Michael Keaton’s Mr. Mom and the wife of Richard Dreyfuss’s character in Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

 

As Garr told an interviewer in 2008, breaking the glass ceiling in the sexist entertainment industry was a challenge for her. She was told by the producers of The Sonny and Cher Show that she had the option of quitting if she was unhappy with her salary. “The whole world is sexist, starting with that show,” she complained. “That was an example of it: not getting paid what everybody else got paid for doing the same thing. So I started learning early that women are steamrolled.”

She added: “If there’s ever a woman who’s smart, funny, or witty, people are afraid of that, so they don’t write that. They only write parts for women where they let everything be steamrolled over them, where they let people wipe their feet all over them. Those are the kind of parts I play, and the kind of parts that there are for me in this world. In this life.”

In 2006, Garr published her autobiography, Speedbumps: Flooring it Through Hollywood.
Garr is survived by her daughter, Molly O’Neil, and her grandson Tyryn.

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