Teri Garr, the quirky comedy actor who rose from background dancer in Elvis Presley movies to co-star of such favourites as Young Frankenstein and Tootsie, has died. She was 79.
Garr died Tuesday of multiple sclerosis “surrounded by family and friends,” said publicist Heidi Schaeffer. Garr battled other health problems in recent years, and underwent an operation in January 2007 to repair an aneurysm.
Admirers took to social media to honour her, with writer-director Paul Feig calling her “truly one of my comedy heroes. I couldn’t have loved her more.” Screenwriter Cinco Paul said: “Never the star, but always shining. She made everything she was in better.”
The actor, who was sometimes credited as Terri, Terry or Terry Ann during her long career, seemed destined for show business from her childhood.
Her father was Eddie Garr, a well-known vaudeville comedian; her mother was Phyllis Lind, one of the original high-kicking Rockettes at New York’s Radio City Music Hall.
Among the memorable performances in actress Teri Garr’s nearly 50-year career were her comedic performances in Mel Brooks’s 1974 classic Young Frankenstein and her Oscar-nominated role, opposite Dustin Hoffman, in 1982’s Tootsie.
Garr’s career began as a dancer
Their daughter began dance lessons at age six, and by 14 was dancing with the San Francisco and Los Angeles ballet companies. She was 16 when she joined the road company of West Side Story in Los Angeles, and as early as 1963 she began appearing in bit parts in films.
She recalled in a 1988 interview how she won the West Side Story role. After being dropped from her first audition, she returned a day later in different clothes and was accepted.
From there, the blond, statuesque Garr found steady work dancing in movies, and she appeared in the chorus of nine Presley films, including Viva Las Vegas, Roustabout and Clambake. She also appeared 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.
Big break came in 1974’s The Conversation
Her big film break came as Gene Hackman’s girlfriend in 1974’s Francis Ford Coppola thriller The Conversation. That led to an interview with Mel Brooks, who said he would hire her for the role of Gene Wilder’s German lab assistant in 1974’s Young Frankenstein — if she could speak with a German accent.
“Cher had this German woman, Renata, making wigs, so I got the accent from her,” Garr once recalled. The film established her as a talented comedy performer, with New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael proclaiming her “the funniest neurotic dizzy dame on the screen.”
“Her ‘German’ accent had us all in stitches,” Brooks recalled in a social media post expressing his condolences.
“She was so talented and so funny. Her humour and lively spirit made the Young Frankenstein set a pleasure to work on, the legendary director and screenwriter wrote on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter. “She will be greatly missed.”
Garr’s big smile and off-centre appeal helped land her roles in Oh God! opposite George Burns and John Denver, Mr. Mom as Michael Keaton’s wife, and Tootsie, in which she played the girlfriend who loses Dustin Hoffman to Jessica Lange and learns that he has dressed up as a woman to revive his career. (She also lost the supporting actress Oscar at that year’s Academy Awards to Lange.)
Although best known for comedy, Garr showed in such films as 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 said, adding she had become typecast as a comic actor.
She had a flair for spontaneous humour, 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 the pair’s good-natured bickering so convincing, that for a time rumours cropped up that they were romantically involved. Years later, Letterman credited those early appearances with helping make the show a hit.
So very sorry to hear about Teri Garr’s passing. She was so talented and so funny. Her humor and lively spirit made the YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN set a pleasure to work on. Her “German” accent had us all in stitches! She will be greatly missed.
—@MelBrooks
Diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 1999
It was also during those years that Garr began to feel “a little beeping or ticking” in her right leg. It began in 1983 and eventually spread to her right arm as well, but she felt she could live with it. By 1999 the symptoms had become so severe that she consulted a doctor.
The diagnosis: multiple sclerosis. For three years, Garr didn’t reveal her illness.
“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.'”
In this 2005 interview on CNN’s Larry King Live, Oscar-nominated actor Teri Garr said she remained optimistic after living with MS for 20 years. Garr, who co-starred in films like Mr. Mom and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, died Tuesday at the age of 79.
After going public, she became a spokesperson for the National Multiple Sclerosis Society, making humorous speeches to gatherings in the U.S. and Canada. “You have to find your centre 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 to act, appearing on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, Greetings From Tucson, Life With Bonnie and other TV shows. She also had a brief recurring role on Friends in the 1990s as Lisa Kudrow’s mother.
After several failed romances, Garr married contractor John O’Neill in 1993. They adopted a daughter, Molly, before divorcing in 1996.
Garr never revealed her age
In her 2005 autobiography, Speedbumps: Flooring It Through Hollywood, Garr explained her decision not to discuss her age. “My mother taught me that showbiz people never tell their real ages. She never revealed hers or my father’s,” she wrote.
California voting registration records gave her date of birth as Dec. 11, 1947. She said she was born in Los Angeles, although most reference books list Lakewood, Ohio.
Teri Garr’s Oscar-nominated performance as the quirky and hopeful Sandy Lester in TOOTSIE.<br><br>With her magnetic humor and relatable charm, Garr lit up every scene, making Sandy—and many of her other characters—unforgettable. <a href=”https://t.co/qKV2wRPx4o”>pic.twitter.com/qKV2wRPx4o</a>
—@TheAcademy
As her father’s career waned, the family, including Garr’s two older brothers, lived with relatives in the Midwest and East. They eventually moved back to California, settling in the San Fernando Valley, where Garr 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 told 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.”
