Tributes pour in for actress who became larger than life on the small screen,
MARY TYLER MOORE 1936-2017
'She'll last forever, as long as there's television' — Carl Reiner
NEW YORK— Mary Tyler Moore, the star of TV’s beloved The Mary Tyler Moore Show whose comic realism helped revolutionize the depiction of women on the small screen, died Wednesday, said her publicist, Mara Buxbaum. She was 80.
In a career that began as Happy Hotpoint, the dancing and singing three-inch pixie in Hotpoint appliance commercials on The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet in 1955 when she was 18, Moore went on to star in television and films and on Broadway.
Moore gained fame in the 1960s as the frazzled wife Laura Petrie on The Dick Van Dyke Show. In the 1970s, she created one of TV’s first careerwoman sitcom heroines in The Mary Tyler Moore Show.
Her death, at Greenwich Hospital, was confirmed by the family. The cause was pneumonia. A family member said she had been removed from a respirator on Tuesday night. Moore had Type 1 diabetes since her early 30s.
“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, told The Associated Press. Moore won seven Emmy awards over the years and was nominated for an Oscar for her 1980 portrayal of an icy mother whose son is killed in Ordinary People.
Moore’s first major TV role was on the classic sitcom 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.
With her unerring gift for comedy, Moore seemed perfectly fashioned to the smarter wit of the new, postEisenhower age. As Laura, she traded in the housedress of countless sit- com 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.
As Carl Reiner, the series’ creator, said of Rob and Laura in a 2004 TV Guide interview: “These were two people who really liked each other.”
Moore agreed, saying: “We brought romance to comedy, and, yes, Rob and Laura had sex!”
Decades later, he spoke warmly of the chaste but palpable off-screen crush they shared during the show’s run. Van Dyke often praised Moore’s abilities as a comedic actress — one who has been credited with turning crying into a comic art form and who memorably got her toe stuck in a hotel bathtub faucet in one episode.
“She was one of the few who could maintain her femininity and be funny at the same time,” Van Dyke said in a 1998 interview with the Archive of American Television. “You have to go as far back as Carole Lombard or Myrna Loy to find someone who could play it that well and still be tremendously appealing as a woman.”
They also appeared together in several TV specials over the years and in 2003, co-starred in a PBS production of the play The Gin Game.
But it was as Mary Richards, the plucky Minneapolis TV news producer on The Mary Tyler Moore Show (1970-77), that Moore truly made her mark.
At a time when women’s liberation was catching on worldwide, her character brought to TV audiences an independent, 1970s career woman. Other than Marlo Thomas’ 1960s sitcom character “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.” And millions agreed with the show’s theme song that she could “turn the world on with her smile.”
Susan Silver said one of her chief contributions as a writer on The Mary Tyler Moore Show was to “get her some sex.”
Playing Laura Petrie a few years earlier, Moore and her TV husband had been made to sleep in separate beds. But it was the ’70s now. Even good girls had sex. Silver and the other women writing for The Mary Tyler Moore Show made sure of it.
As Moore’s new sitcom character, the independent, single career woman Mary Richards, put it in one episode: “I’m hardly innocent. I’ve been around. Well, all right, I might not have been around. But I’ve been nearby.”
The series ran seven seasons and 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 told The Associated Press in 1995. “My life is inextricably intertwined with Mary Richards’, and probably always will be.” Moore won her seventh Emmy in 1993, for supporting actress in a miniseries or special, for a Lifetime network movie, Stolen Babies. She had won two for The Dick Van Dyke Show and the other four for Mary Tyler Moore. In 2012, Moore received the Screen Actors Guild’s lifetime achievement award.
On the big screen, Moore’s appearances were less frequent. 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. 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 real life, Moore also endured personal tragedy. The same year Ordinary People came out, her only child, Richard, who’d had trouble in school and with drugs, accidentally shot himself at 24. Her younger sister, Elizabeth, died at 21from a combination of a painkillers and alcohol.
In her1995 autobiography After All, Moore admitted she helped her terminally ill brother try to commit suicide by feeding him ice cream laced with a deadly overdose of drugs. The attempt failed, and her 47-year-old brother, John, died three months later in 1992 of kidney cancer.
Moore herself lived with juvenile diabetes for some 40 years and told of her struggle in her 2009 book, Growing Up Again. She also spent five weeks at the Betty Ford Clinic in 1984 for alcohol abuse.
She had battled diabetes for many years. In 2011, she underwent surgery to remove a benign tumour on the lining of her brain.
In 1983, Moore married cardiologist Robert Levine, who survives her. In 2002, 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. With files from the Los Angeles Times and New York Times