Teri Garr, Oscar-nominated and quirky cute actress, died on Tuesday in Los Angeles after a long battle with multiple sclerosis.
She was a familiar face on television and film in the 70s, 80s, and 90s. She announced she had been diagnosed with MS in 2002, and suffered an aneurysm in 2006.
Born in Ohio, Garr’s career started as a go-go dancer, seen behind the performers of the T.A.M.I. Show and Elvis Presley films, and on sitcoms such as “That Girl,” “Batman,” and “The Andy Griffith Show.”
Despite her obvious appeal to great directors, she found many of her encounters in the business to be unbearably sexist, such as being told by “The Sonny and Cher Show” producers that if she wanted to be paid as much as the men, she could quit. “The whole world is sexist, starting with that show. That was an example of it: not getting paid what everybody else got paid for doing the same thing. So I started learning early that women are steamrolled,” she said.
Garr got her first successful and recognized role as an assistant, Inga, in the film “Young Frankenstein” with Gene Wilder in 1974.
She played the wife of Richard Dreyfuss’s character in Spielberg’s “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” in 1977.
She earned an Oscar nomination in “Tootsie” along Dustin Hoffman in 1982.
She played working mom to Michael Keaton’s dad character in “Mr. Mom” in 1983.