Rhoda actress rose from wisecracking sidekick to star of her own spinoff show

Valerie Harper, who has died aged 80, played Rhoda Morgenstern on and its 1970s spinoff, creating one of television’s most memorable brash, Bronx-bred Jewish-American comedy princesses, though she was neither Jewish nor a native New Yorker.

One of television’s best-loved sidekicks, she initially played Rhoda as the frumpy friend of the glamorous Mary Richards (Mary Tyler Moore), the cool career girl cutting a swath through a television newsroom in Minneapolis, Minnesota. By contrast, as the girl in the flat above, Harper looked every inch the lovable loser, unlucky in love, worrying about her weight and wrapping herself in a grubby dressing-gown – she described Rhoda’s bohemian style as ‘‘camouflage dressing’’ – while off-duty from her job as a window-dresser at a department store.

‘‘Women really identified with Rhoda because her problems and fears were theirs,’’ Harper explained in her memoir. ‘‘Despite the fact that she was the butt of most of her own jokes, so to speak, running down her looks and her potential, she never acted defeated. Her confident swagger masked her insecurity. Rhoda never gave up.’’

Harper herself grew in self-belief after winning three Emmy awards for The Mary Tyler Moore Show, and in 1974 her character was given her own series. In its heyday, Rhoda was one of the most successful US TV spinoffs, not least for Harper’s fiery portrayal of the central character.

Valerie Kathryn Harper was born in Suffern, a village about 50 kilometres from New York, the daughter of a sales executive whose job required him to move himself and his family from town to town. After sojourns in Oregon, Michigan and California, they finally settled in New Jersey, only for her parents to divorce when she was 17.

Raised a Roman Catholic, she lost interest in religion as a teenager and devoted herself instead to dancing, graduating from the corps de ballet at the Radio City Music Hall to the chorus line of the musical Li’l Abner during its run in Las Vegas and, in 1959, the Hollywood film version.

She supplemented her wages as a dancer in various Broadway musicals by taking casual jobs in telesales and working as a hat-check girl before joining the Second City acting troupe in Chicago in 1964. There she met and married her fellow actor Richard Schaal, moving in 1969 to Los Angeles, where he founded his own theatrical company.

The following year she successfully auditioned for The Mary Tyler Moore Show.

‘‘She croaked out one line,’’ one producer remembered, ‘‘and we had what we’d been looking for.’’ At the end of the show’s first series, she won an Emmy for best supporting

actress in a comedy, an achievement she repeated for the following two seasons.

Rhoda brought her a fourth Emmy, in 1975, for outstanding lead actress, and a Golden Globe, for best TV actress.

She subsequently starred in Valerie, a 1980s sitcom that was more remarkable for its behind-thescenes intrigues than the on-screen action. Within a year she became embroiled in a row with the producers over her salary that eventually proved intractable. She was abruptly fired, and written out in a fatal car crash. When she sued for breach of contract, a jury awarded her US$1.4 million plus a percentage of the show’s profits.

In 2007 she returned to Broadway, playing Golda Meir in Golda’s Balcony, then Tallulah Bankhead in Looped, for which she was nominated for a Tony award. She appeared in films intermittently, winning Golden Globe nominations for the buddy cop comedy Freebie and the Bean in 1974 and in Chapter Two (1979), based on a play by Neil Simon.

A lifelong non-smoker, she discovered in 2009 that she had lung cancer; she had surgery that appeared to be successful. In 2013, however, leptomeningeal carcinomatosis was diagnosed: a rare complication in which the cancer spreads to the membranes surrounding the brain. That year she published her autobiography, I, Rhoda.

Harper had always campaigned vigorously for women’s rights, and with fellow actor Dennis Weaver founded an organisation in Los Angeles called Love Is Feeding Everyone (Life), which provided food for 150,000 needy people a week.

After her cancer returned, she spoke out in interviews and public lectures about the need for greater funding for lung cancer research and the importance of early diagnosis. She took part in the US version of Dancing with the Stars.

Despite her illness, Harper recently provided guest voices for The Simpsons, reuniting with her Rhoda co-star Julie Kavner, who voices Marge.

She divorced Schaal in 1978. In 1987 she married Tony Cacciotti, who survives her with their daughter Cristina.

‘‘Women really identified with Rhoda because her problems and fears were theirs.’’

Valerie Harper in her autobiography