Comic helped blaze trail
LOS ANGELES Rose Marie chafed at being a supporting player in the shadow of Mary Tyler Moore’s fetching suburban housewife on The Dick Van Dyke Show.
But it was as feisty comedy writer Sally Rogers that Rose Marie stretched the narrow confines of how women were portrayed on TV in the mid-20th century.
Sally was an independent single woman who handled her job as adroitly as her male colleagues and who dated but refused to pine away for romance.
Rose Marie, who died Thursday at 94, was proud to have created a woman defined by her work, a rare sitcom character at the time who wasn’t “a wife, mother, or housekeeper,” she tweeted in 2017.
It represented one milestone in an extraordinary acting and singing career that started when she was a toddler, stretched over nearly a century and included success in theatre, radio, nightclubs, movies and TV.
“There’s never been a more engaging & multi-talented performer .... & always had audiences clamouring for more!!” Carl Reiner, creator of The Dick Van Dyke Show, posted Thursday on Twitter.
“Heaven just got a whole lot funnier” read the tribute posted on her website.
The subject of the 2017 documentary Wait for Your Laugh, Rose Marie often claimed she had the longest career in entertainment history.
It spanned some 90 years, with co-stars ranging from W.C. Fields (in the 1933 movie International House) to Garfield the cat.
The highlight for many was The Dick Van Dyke Show, the 196166 sitcom widely loved for its sophisticated writing, inspired casting and insightful view of the inner workings of the then-new medium of television.
Van Dyke starred as Rob Petrie, head writer for a hit comedy-variety show and Moore, in her first major role, played his wife Laura.
The blond, raspy-voiced Rose Marie teamed with her pal Morey Amsterdam as assistant writers.
The Dick Van Dyke Show not only was an ideal vehicle for Rose Marie’s comic gifts, but was a showcase for her singing.She had conflicts with Reiner, resenting that Moore was given more prominence than her on the show. Reiner, speaking in Wait for Your Laugh, bluntly pushed back. “I used real strong language,” he recalled. “I said, ‘You both have beautiful legs. They wanna look at her legs.’ ”
Nominated three times for Emmys, Rose Marie had yet to turn 40 when she joined the Van Dyke cast, but had been an entertainer for more than 30 years.
She received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2001. In 2017, she extended her reach to social media, her Twitter feed quickly attracting more than 100,000 followers.