SAD NEWS: ‘Tootsie’ Star Teri Garr Passes at 79, Leaving Behind a Legacy and Her Brave Battle with MS

 

Garr, who received an Academy Award nomination for her role in Tootsie, revealed she had been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 2002.

Teri Garr passed away at the age of 79.

Garr worked extensively in film and television, with over 140 credits to her name. She was best known for her comedic performances in movies like Young Frankenstein (1974) and Tootsie (1982), for which she received an Academy Award nomination. In 2002, Garr disclosed that she had been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis.

Garr died on Tuesday due to the illness, “surrounded by family and friends,” her publicist Heidi Schaeffer told PEOPLE.

Garr was born in Ohio in 1944. Her parents were in show business: her father was a vaudeville performer, and her mother was a Rockette who eventually worked in costume design. The family, which also included her two older brothers, moved to New Jersey before settling in Los Angeles. Garr’s father passed away when she was 11.

“She raised two kids,” Garr told the Los Angeles Times in 2008 about her mother. “I have a brother who’s a surgeon, there’s me, and my other brother builds boats. She worked in costume. She was a costumer in the studio. She always said, ‘We’re still here…’”

Garr started training as a dancer, focusing on ballet. She left college to move to New York and focus on acting, studying at the Actors Studio and the Lee Strasberg Theatre and Film Institute.

Her early roles allowed her to showcase her dancing skills. She appeared in six Elvis Presley films, including Viva Las Vegas (1964), and was a dancer on TV variety shows.

“I got tired of dancing in the chorus,” she told Roger Ebert in 1980. “I trained for 10 years. Finally, I thought, ‘Why am I not up front? I didn’t train all those years to be in the back and make no money.’”

She continued, “But I was shy and sweet. So, I started seeing a psychiatrist and learned how to talk to people. Directors would say, ‘We want you to play a character a little less complex than you are.’ Yeah, right. What they meant was, ‘You’re playing a fool.’”

Her first speaking role came in Head, a 1968 film starring The Monkees and written by Jack Nicholson, whom she had met in acting class. That same year, she appeared in Star Trek episode “Assignment: Earth,” her first significant speaking part. She also became a regular on The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour in 1972.

Soon, Garr began to find mainstream success. In 1974, she appeared in Francis Ford Coppola’s thriller The Conversation. That same year, she starred as Inga, Dr. Frankenstein’s assistant, in Mel Brooks’ horror-comedy Young Frankenstein, a role she landed with some help from her mother.

“My mom was the costumer on Young Frankenstein,” she told PBS in 2012. “I asked if they were done casting, and she said she didn’t know.” Garr asked her agent to get her an audition, and after four rounds, she got the part. “It was amazing.” Her time on Sonny & Cher helped her land the role. “I got the German accent from Cher’s hairdresser,” she revealed.

Three years later, she starred in Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind, showcasing her dramatic skills. Then, in 1982, she co-starred with Dustin Hoffman in Tootsie. Film critic Pauline Kael called Garr “the funniest neurotic dizzy dame on the screen.” She received an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress for the role, though she lost to her Tootsie co-star, Jessica Lange.

Garr’s other major film roles during that period included One From the Heart (1981), Mr. Mom (1983), After Hours (1985), and Mom and Dad Save the World (1992). But in a male-dominated comedy world, Garr struggled to add depth to her roles and wasn’t always successful.

“I tried to make the character a bit more real,” she told the Washington Post in 1983 about her role in Mr. Mom. “And they paralyzed me. You don’t have to be too smart in this business to realize that the only way to get to do something you really want to do is to become a director.”

On television, she appeared in shows like McCloud, MASH*, The Bob Newhart Show, The Odd Couple, Maude, and Barnaby Jones. She hosted Saturday Night Live three times in 1980, 1983, and 1985. Garr was a frequent guest on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson and Late Night with David Letterman, although she told Roger Ebert in 1988 that her appearances on Letterman, where she often filled in for canceled guests, likely prevented her from landing more serious roles.

“The first time I went on Letterman was to promote something, and then I came back as the court jester,” she said. Ebert noted that Garr was one of the only Letterman guests who could “rattle his aplomb.”

Garr’s later roles included Casper Meets Wendy, the Designing Women spinoff Women of the House, Dick, and Ghost World. She also appeared on Friends as Phoebe’s biological mother.

In 2002, Garr revealed that she had been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis during the 1990s. She began noticing symptoms while filming One From the Heart and Tootsie.

In 2006, she published a memoir, Speedbumps: Flooring It Through Hollywood, in which she opened up about her illness. “MS is a sneaky disease,” she wrote in an excerpt published by PEOPLE. “Like some of my boyfriends, it has a tendency to show up at the most inconvenient times and then disappear completely. It took doctors over 20 years to figure out what was wrong. Sometimes they’d mention MS, but all the tests came back fine. Then the symptoms would disappear, and I’d forget about it, more or less.”

Rumors about her diagnosis before it became public hurt her career. “Whatever this multiple sclerosis thing was, the industry didn’t want to hear about it,” she wrote. “At first, I got mad. Whatever was going on in my body had been going on for years. It never interfered with my work. Then I started to think that maybe the job offers dried up because I sucked as an actress. It was a tough trio: mysterious symptoms, my insecurities about my ability to act, and the reality of being an ‘aging’ actress.”

Garr became a national ambassador for the National Multiple Sclerosis Society and the national chair of the society’s Women Against MS program. She limited the number of projects she took on and retired from acting in 2011.

“Slowing down isn’t in my nature, but I have to do it,” she told Brain & Life magazine in 2005. “Stress, anxiety, and all those tension-inducing things aren’t good for MS.”

Garr married John O’Neil in 1993, and they adopted their daughter, Molly. The couple separated in 1996.

She is survived by her daughter, 30-year-old Molly O’Neil, and her 6-year-old grandson, Tyryn.