String of Emmys for Rhoda character
VALERIE HARPER won four Emmy awards playing budding feminist Rhoda Morgenstern on the classic 1970s television series The Mary Tyler Moore Show and her own spinoff sitcom.
She died on August 30, aged
80.
Harper had revealed to People
magazine in March 2013 she had leptomeningeal carcinomatosis — cancer cells in the membrane of her brain.
She made a surprising comeback after the 2013 diagnosis, which had given her only months to live. Just seven months later, she competed on the Dancing With the Stars
programme, and in 2015 she made an appearance on the sitcom 2 Broke Girls.
Harper, who also was diagnosed with lung cancer in 2009, stayed busy campaigning for cancer research and taking occasional acting and voiceover jobs as recently as earlier this year.
Harper was still relatively inexperienced as an actress in 1970 when she was cast on The Mary Tyler Moore Show — one of the most honoured US television shows of the 1970s — as Rhoda Morgenstern, the best friend and neighbour of Moore’s Mary Richards character in Minneapolis.
Rhoda was a Bronxborn career girl who was constantly trying to lose weight, find a boyfriend and dodge her meddling Jewish mother. She had a brassy Bohemian streak, as exemplified by her trademark headscarves, and a grasp of emerging feminist concepts but her selfdeprecating wisecracks showed her vulnerabilities.
Asked why the character was so popular with viewers, Harper told The New Yorker: ‘‘They recognised her as real. She had a weight problem and she was insecure. She was a New Yorker. But she also had this victorious streak. She could be belligerent and she could stand on her own.’’
Harper told Time magazine part of Rhoda’s appeal was that she was a loser — but a ‘‘victorious loser’’.
Harper won three straight Emmys for best supporting actress in a comedy on Moore’s show — 1971 through 1973 — and in 1974, Time magazine featured the two of them in a cover story titled ‘‘TV’s Funny Girls’’.
That same year, Harper was given her own show, Rhoda, which ran for five years and earned her another Emmy for best actress in a comedy in 1975.
With Rhoda moving back to her native New York, her romantic fortunes improved and she married her boyfriend Joe in a widely viewed episode. By the show’s fourth season, however, Rhoda and Joe had divorced and she was back in the dating pool.
Mary Tyler Moore Show costar Ed Asner wrote of Harper on Twitter: ‘‘A beautiful woman, a wonderful actress, a great friend and with balls bigger than mine.
‘‘Her brilliance burst through and shined its light upon all of us.’’