By Lisa Richwine
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) -Academy Award-nominated comedy actress Teri Garr, whose sunny personality lit up the screen in films such as “Young Frankenstein” and “Tootsie,” died on Tuesday at age 79.
Garr, who earned an Oscar nomination for her role opposite Dustin Hoffman in the 1982 gender-swap comedy “Tootsie,” died in Los Angeles from complications of multiple sclerosis, publicist Heidi Schaeffer said.
The actor disclosed in 2002 that she had been diagnosed with MS after experiencing symptoms for some two decades. She became an advocate for MS research and treatment. In 2007, Garr underwent surgery for a brain aneurysm and was confined to a wheelchair for a time.
“I had to learn to walk again, to talk again and to think again, which I’m not even sure is necessary in Hollywood,” she joked in an interview with Reuters in 2008.
Teri Ann Garr was born on Dec. 11, 1944 in the Cleveland suburb of Lakewood, Ohio, to show-business parents: Her father, Eddie, was a vaudeville performer and actor who appeared on Broadway and her mother, Phyllis, danced at New York’s Radio City Music Hall as one of the Rockettes.
After attending college in Los Angeles, Garr moved to New York City to pursue a career in ballet and then in acting, studying at the famed Actors Studio in Manhattan.
Some of her earliest credits included work as a background dancer in Elvis Presley’s “Viva Las Vegas.”
After roles on TV shows such as “Star Trek” and “Batman,” Garr was cast by Mel Brooks as a German lab assistant in the 1974 film “Young Frankenstein”.
“Her humor and lively spirit made the ‘Young Frankenstein’ set a pleasure to work on,” Brooks wrote on X on Tuesday. “Her ‘German’ accent had us all in stitches! She will be greatly missed.”
Michael Keaton, who starred with Garr in “Mr. Mom,” also paid tribute.
“Forget about how great she was as an actress and comedienne. She was a wonderful woman,” Keaton said on Instagram, adding “go back and watch her comedic work – man, was she great!!”
“Loved her so much,” comedian Steve Martin wrote above a photo of Garr.
Outside of comedy, Garr also had memorable drama roles. For “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” she played the wife of a man obsessed with UFOs (Richard Dreyfuss) in the Steven Spielberg science-fiction classic.
Garr said her sense of humor had helped her persevere through health challenges.
“It’s absolutely critical,” she told Reuters. “A sense of humor and attitude is the most important thing in everything.”
(Reporting by Lisa Richwine; Editing by Nick Zieminski and Lisa Shumaker)
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