SHE WAS BOTH MARY TYLER MOORE AND MARY RICHARDS. AN ICON FOR HER AGE AND A COMEDIC TALENT WHO COULD TURN THE WORLD ON WITH HER SMILE.
TV TRAIL BLAZER’S COMIC REALISM CAPTIVATED AUDIENCES
At a time when women’s liberation was catching on worldwide, Mary Tyler Moore’s comic realism helped revolutionize the depiction of women on television, portraying Mary Richards, a plucky Minneapolis TV news producer.
She created one of TV’s first career-woman sitcom heroines in The Mary Tyler Moore Show, which ran from 1970 to 1977. The role brought to audiences an independent, modern woman. Other than Marlo Thomas in That Girl, who at least had a steady boyfriend, there were few precedents.
Mary Richards was comfortable being single in her 30s, and while she dated, she wasn’t desperate to get married. She sparred affectionately with her gruff boss, Lou Grant, played by Ed Asner, and addressed him always as “Mr. Grant.”
Moore, who won seven Emmy awards and was nominated for an Oscar for her 1980 portrayal of an affluent mother whose son is accidentally killed in Ordinary People, died Wednesday. She was 80.
She had battled diabetes for many years. In 2011, she underwent surgery to remove a benign tumour on the lining of her brain, but the cause of death was not immediately released.
The Mary Tyler Moore Show was filled with laughs. But no episode was more memorable than the bittersweet finale when new management fired the entire WJM News staff — everyone but the preening, clueless anchorman, Ted Baxter. Thus did the series dare to question whether Mary Richards actually did “make it after all.”
The series won 29 Emmys, a record that stood for a quarter-century until Frasier broke it in 2002.
“Everything I did was by the seat of the pants. I reacted to every written situation the way I would have in real life,” Moore said in 1995. “My life is inextricably intertwined with Mary Richards,’ and probably always will be.”
Moore gained fame in the early 1960s as the frazzled wife Laura Petrie on The Dick Van Dyke Show, in which she played the young homemaker wife of Van Dyke’s character, comedy writer Rob Petrie, from 1961-66.
“She was an impressive person and a talented person and a beautiful person. A force of nature,” said producer, creator and director Carl Reiner, who created the The Dick Van Dyke Show. “She’ll last forever, as long as there’s television. Year after year, we’ll see her face in front of us.”
With her unerring gift for comedy, Moore seemed perfectly fashioned to the smarter wit of the new, post-Eisenhower age. As Laura, she traded in the housedress of countless sitcom wives for Capri pants that were as fashionable as they were suited to a modern American woman.
Laura was a dream wife and mother, but not perfect. Viewers identified with her flustered moments and her protracted, plaintive cry to her husband: “Ohhhh, Robbbb!”
Moore’s chemistry with Van Dyke was unmistakable. Decades later, he spoke warmly of the chaste but palpable off-screen crush they shared during the show’s run.
On the big screen, Moore’s appearances were infrequent. She was a 1920s flapper in the hit 1967 musical Thoroughly Modern Millie and a nun who falls for Elvis Presley in Change of Habit in 1969.
She turned to serious drama in 1980’s Ordinary People, playing an affluent, bitter mother who loses a son in an accident. The film won the Oscar for best picture and best director for Robert Redford, and it earned Moore an Oscar nomination and a Golden Globe.
In 1983, Moore married cardiologist Robert Levine, who survives her. Her marriage to producer Grant Tinker lasted from 1962 to 1981. Before that, she was married to Dick Meeker from 1955 to 1961.
Moore was born in 1936 in Brooklyn; the family moved to California when she was around 8 years old. She began dance lessons as a child and launched her career while still in her teens, appearing in TV commercials.
In 1992, Moore received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. A decade later, a life-size bronze statue went on display in Minneapolis, depicting her tossing her trademark tam into the air as she did in the opening credits of The Mary Tyler Moore Show.