Star of screen — both large and small
AMERICAN actress Cloris Leachman won eight Emmys for her work on The Mary Tyler Moore Show and other television programmes as well as an Academy Award for The Last Picture Show.
She died on January 27, aged 94. Leachman, who appeared in three of Mel Brooks’ comic movies, kept acting regularly well into her 90s.
She was a contestant on Dancing With the Stars at age 82 and appeared in the 2019 reboot of the comedy series Mad About You.
Two films that she made in 2019 and 2020 have yet to be released.
Brooks called her “insanely talented”.
“She could make you laugh or cry at the drop of a hat . . . Every time I hear a horse whinny I will forever think of Cloris’ unforgettable Frau Blucher,” Brooks wrote on Twitter, referring to her role in Young Frankenstein.
Leachman grew up in Des Moines, Iowa, and studied under Elia Kazan at the Actors Studio in New York, where Marlon Brando was a classmate.
Starting in the late 1940s, her early jobs included working on stage with Katharine Hepburn in As You Like It,
as well as small roles in movies and live television dramas.
One of her first regular jobs was playing the mother on the popular Lassie show in the late 1950s. Television would provide many of Leachman’s greatest successes.
She won best supporting actress Emmys in 1974 and 1975 for playing the nosy landlady on The Mary Tyler Moore Show, which led to a twoyear run for Leachman in her own spinoff series, Phyllis.
She also won Emmys for playing cranky Grandma Ida on Malcolm in the Middle in 2002 and 2006, as well as roles in the drama Promised Land in 1998, a Screen Actors Guild variety show in 1984, a 1975 appearance on Cher’s variety show and A Brand New Life, a 1973 television movie.
She was nominated 12 other times and also won a Daytime Emmy in 1972.
Leachman’s movie work also was distinguished, highlighted by The Last Picture Show in which she played Ruth Popper, the emotionally crippled wife of a smalltown football coach who has an affair with one of his players. As director Peter Bogdanovich predicted, she won an Oscar for the role.
Leachman made an impression in three of
Brooks’ movies, playing comically villainous characters in Young Frankenstein and High Anxiety and Madame Defarge from A Tale of Two Cities in History of the World: Part 1.
Leachman took a lighthearted and unpredictable approach to life. A lifelong vegetarian, she was in her 70s when she appeared nude — but with her body painted with fruits and vegetables — on the cover of Alternative Health magazine in 1997.
Leachman and directorproducer George Englund married in 1953 and divorced in 1979. They had five children.