Valerie Harper, ‘Mary Tyler Moore Show’s self-deprecating and loyal Rhoda, dies at 80
Valerie Harper, the actress who became a television star for her portrayal of Rhoda Morgenstern – the sharp-tongued yet lovable friend of Mary Richards on the long-running Mary Tyler Moore Show – has died. She was 80.
The TV star had been battling cancer since 2009 and long defied a 2013 diagnosis that gave her three months to live. Her death was confirmed Friday by The Associated Press.
Harper’s Rhoda was everybody’s best friend in the 1970s, the gal pal many faithful fans of The Mary Tyler Moore Show wished they had.
She was open-hearted, honest and all too human. She laughed at herself and at life as she struggled with her weight, her career and, for the first few seasons, her love life, lending her portrayal of Moore’s wisecracking sidekick an endearing quality that resonated powerfully with viewers.
Fans identified so strongly with Rhoda that they sometimes seemed to regard the actress and her popular character as one and the same, Harper often said.
“I think the character just clicked with people because there was something real about her,” Harper once told the Passaic County, NJ, Herald News. “Mary had this politeness and squareness about her. But Rhoda was Rhoda. She was a kick in the butt.”
The actress won four Emmys as the beloved character, including for her leading role on Rhoda, the spinoff that ran from 1974 to 1978.
Harper was diagnosed with lung cancer in 2009, and in early 2013 learned it had become terminal after spreading to the lining of her brain. Doctors told her she had three months to live, but she began chemotherapy and plunged back into work anyway.
A former dancer in Broadway musicals and an accomplished improvisational actress, Harper was also a political activist who worked for many progressive causes, including women’s rights and fighting hunger.
On stage, Harper played former Israeli prime minister Golda Meir and 1930s star Tallulah Bankhead. But she was best known as Rhoda, the tart-tongued department store window dresser beset with insecurities. One reviewer dubbed the character a “triumphant loser” for her ability to rebound.
In 1970, Harper was appearing in a play at Los Angeles’ Mark Taper Forum when she auditioned for the role of Moore’s neighbor in the star’s proposed new series, which would tell the story of an unmarried career
woman making a fresh start in Minneapolis.
Harper badly wanted the part. To get a leg up, she carted along some props, a bucket and rag, to use in a window-washing scene she knew would be part of the audition.
THE MARY Tyler Moore Show, which aired on CBS from 1970 to 1977, was a hit, showcasing the late Moore as a cool but vulnerable independent woman in her early 30s who works as an assistant producer for a news program at a Minneapolis TV station.
Along with Moore and Harper, the show starred Ed Asner as the irascible but warm-hearted producer Lou Grant and a host of other memorable characters, including preening news anchor Ted Baxter, played by Ted Knight; Phyllis, Mary’s busybody landlady, played by Leachman; and Sue Ann Nivens, the perky on-screen homemaker, played by Betty White.
Harper was an immediate fan favorite, known for her ability to deliver the stream of one-liners, most of them about food or men, provided by the show’s writers. “I don’t know why I should even bother to eat this,” Rhoda said of a piece of candy, in one oft-repeated line. “I should just apply it directly to my hips.”
She won three consecutive Emmys as best supporting actress in a comedy for the role. In 1975, she won a fourth, as lead actress, for Rhoda, in which a slimmed-down, more chic version of the character moves home to New York and, at long last, lands a man.
A thoroughly modern woman, at least for network television of the day, Rhoda got married, separated and divorced, all on the air. The show’s first segment, which aired September 9, 1974, dislodged All in the Family from its perennial spot atop the Nielsen ratings; Rhoda’s on-air marriage that October to Joe Gerard, played by David Groh, was one of the most watched events in television sitcom history.
Harper was born August 22, 1939, in Suffern, NY, the middle of three children of Iva, a nurse, and Howard Harper, a lighting sales executive. She was, as she described herself in I, Rhoda, her 2013 memoir, “an average, chunky little brunette with a pronounced lisp that I didn’t lose until the third grade.”
She studied drama, eventually meeting and marrying Richard Schaal, an actor with the Chicago-based Second City improv group, which she also joined. In 1969, the couple moved to Los Angeles, where Schaal founded a theater company. They later divorced.
She met her second husband, Tony Cacciotti, an actor turned physical trainer, in the late 1970s, when she hired him to help her get in shape for a bathing suit scene in the 1979 Neil Simon film Chapter Two. They married in 1979 and had a daughter, Cristina.
In a 2017 People interview, Harper credited Cacciotti, who became her devoted caregiver, for her longevity.
“He does everything for me, drives me everywhere, makes sure I’m eating healthy, walking and lifting weights. Really, he’s the best nudge in the world,” she said.
(Los Angeles Times/TNS)