Teri Garr, the Oscar-nominated actress best known for her scene-stealing comedic turns in Young Frankenstein and Tootsie—whom the New Yorker film cri
Teri Garr, the Oscar-nominated actress best known for her scene-stealing comedic turns in Young Frankenstein and Tootsie—whom the New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael once called “the funniest neurotic dizzy dame on the screen,” died Tuesday, following a decades-long fight against multiple sclerosis, Variety reports. She was 79.
When remembering how he cast Garr in her breakout role as Inga, Dr. Frankenstein’s comely lab assistant in Young Frankenstein, Mel Brooks jokingly recalled, “Gene (Wilder) told me about this Teri Garr person. We had some film on Teri and I said, ‘She’s absolutely beautiful; can she act?’ And Gene said, ‘Who gives a shit?’”
She could act. In the 1970s and early ’80s, Garr worked with Hollywood’s leading directors, including Francis Ford Coppola (The Conversation), Steven Spielberg (Close Encounters of the Third Kind), Carl Reiner (Oh, God!), and Martin Scorsese (After Hours).
She could also dance. Her earliest screen appearances were vivacious dancing roles in the seminal rock concert film T.A.M.I. Show, Pajama Party, and seven Elvis Presley films, including Viva Las Vegas.
Garr was also a sparkling and quick-witted talk show guest, most memorably on Late Night With David Letterman; the host called her one of his favorites. She and Letterman enjoyed a charming rapport. Perhaps her most audacious appearance came in 1985, when Letterman filmed a show entirely in his office and goaded her into taking a shower during the program. “I hate you,” she can be heard screaming behind the shower curtain. “Why am I doing this?”
Garr was born in Lakewood, Ohio, on December 11, 1944. Her father, Eddie Garr, was a former vaudevillian and nightclub entertainer who later appeared on Broadway. Her mother, Phyllis, was an original Radio City Rockette. Eddie died when Teri was 11, and her mother moved the family to California, where she became a costumer. Her credits included the TV series That Girl and the films Tell Me You Love Me, Junie Moon, and Walking Tall.
Prior to her one dramatic scene in The Conversation, Garr appeared in several popular TV series, including Star Trek, Batman, and It Takes a Thief. She was a member of the ensemble on The Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour, playing various characters in sketches. Jack Nicholson, a classmate in her acting class, got Garr a role in Head, The Monkees’ subversive anti-Hard Day’s Night movie that Nicholson scripted. Released in 1968, the film was not appreciated in its time but has since garnered a cult following. So has One From the Heart, Coppola’s 1982 Las Vegas–set musical, which afforded Garr a occasional leading role but was a box office bomb.
Garr told the AV Club in 2008 that she was reluctant to take a supporting role in Tootsie but that director Sydney Pollack promised her role—Sandy, the neurotic friend of Dustin Hoffman’s character—would be humorous. He also told Garr that she would have inventive input. “So I started writing stuff about (the character) right away and he let me do it,” she said. “And I loved that. Dustin had beaten him into submission, so he’d say, ‘If you have an idea, tell Sydney.’ So I said, ‘Put the camera over there, and I’m going to rush out of the bathroom and say, “What’s the matter with you people? I’ve been in there for a half an hour screaming!’ That was a good part in the movie, right? And I made that up.”
In her 2006 autobiography, Speedbumps: Flooring It Through Hollywood, Garr cited Ginger Rogers, Shirley MacLaine, and Geraldine Page as her big-screen idols. She was often cast as the long-suffering spouse in films such as Close Encounters, Oh, God! and Mr. Mom. She explained to AV Club: “They only write those parts for women. 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.”
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