The actress who went from sidekick to star as TV’s Rhoda

Valerie Harper found fame as one of the most relatable women on TV. The actress spent the 1970s on The Mary Tyler Moore Show, playing Rhoda Morgenstern, the wisecracking upstairs neighbor of Moore’s slender, soft-spoken, and successful Minneapolis news producer Mary Richards. A selfdeprecating, weight-conscious, and perpetually single Jewish expat from the Bronx, Rhoda was foil and best friend to the always prim Mary. “Tomorrow you will meet a crown head of Europe and marry,” Rhoda quips to her pal in one episode. “I will have a fat attack, eat 3,000 peanut butter cups, and die.” Harper earned four Emmys for the role—three for The Mary Tyler Moore Show, which aired on CBS from 1970 to ’77, and one for playing the lead in the spin-off Rhoda, which ran from ’74 to ’78. Harper understood the character’s underdog appeal. “Mary Richards is the woman you wish you were,” she said. “Rhoda is the woman you probably are.” Harper was born in Suffern, N.Y., to a nurse mother and lighting salesman father whose job kept the family on the move, said The New York Times. “Her parents divorced when she was a teenager,” and her dad married an Italian-American woman from the Bronx, whom Harper would use as the model for Rhoda. (The stepmother, like Harper, wasn’t Jewish). At age 16, Harper joined the corps de ballet at Radio City Music Hall, but said she “always felt like a klutz next to those other skinny girls.” After scoring chorus parts in Broadway musicals, including the Lucille Ball–starring Wildcat, Harper moved to Los Angeles, said The Washington Post. Her career flatlined until she was asked to audition for The Mary Tyler Moore Show. After Harper read a few lines, Moore said, “That’s Rhoda.” Wearing “bohemian kaftans, headscarves, and layers of chunky costume jewelry,” Rhoda was an instant fan favorite, said The Guardian (U.K.). The spin-off saw the character—a department-store window dresser—move back to New York and get married: Fifty-two million people tuned in to watch the wedding episode in 1974. Harper went on to take the lead in NBC’s Valerie in 1986-87, playing a working mom with an often absent husband, but a salary dispute led producers to kill off her character in a car accident. She sued, winning $1.4 million plus 12.5 percent of the show’s profits. Harper later returned to Broadway, playing the hard-drinking diva Tallulah Bankhead in 2010’s Looped. But to fans she was always Rhoda, not that Harper minded. The character, she said, will survive “when I’m long gone, and that’s a wonderful thing.”