Mary Tyler Moore
Legendary American stage, film and television actress, as well as a producer and social advocate. She was widely known for her prominent television Sit Com roles in The Dick Van Dyke Show (1961–1966) and The Mary Tyler Moore Show (1970–1977). In her film work, Moore developed a markedly wide range, including 1967's Thoroughly Modern Millie and 1980's Ordinary People, the latter earning Moore a nomination for Academy Award for Best Actress. Moore was a noted advocate for animal rights, vegetarianism and diabetes prevention.
With her two most prominent roles challenging gender stereotypes and norms, The New York Times said Moore's "performances on The Mary Tyler Moore Show and The Dick Van Dyke Show] helped define a new vision of American womanhood." The Guardian said "her outwardly bubbly personality and trademark broad, toothy smile disguised an inner fragility that appealed to an audience facing the new trials of modern-day existence."
Initially intending to be a dancer, Moore's TV career began as "Happy Hotpoint", an elfin creature dancing on Hotpoint home appliances in commercials during the 1950s series Ozzie and Harriet. Her first regular television role was as the mysterious and glamorous telephone receptionist Sam in Richard Diamond, Private Detective. In the show her voice was heard but only her legs appeared on camera, adding to the character's mystique. About this time, she guest-starred in John Cassavetes' NBC detective series Johnny Staccato, and also in Bachelor Father in the episode titled "Bentley and the Big Board". In 1961, Moore appeared in several big parts in movies and on television, including Bourbon Street Beat, 77 Sunset Strip, Surfside 6, Wanted: Dead or Alive, Steve Canyon, Hawaiian Eye, Thriller and Lock-Up.
In 1961, Carl Reiner cast Moore in The Dick Van Dyke Show, a weekly series based on Reiner's own life and career as a writer for Sid Caesar's television Variety Show Your Show of Shows, telling the cast from the outset that it would run for no more than five years. The show was produced by Danny Thomas' company, and Thomas himself recommended her. He remembered Moore as "the girl with three names" whom he had (reluctantly) turned down when casting his daughter in Make Room for Daddy some years earlier. Moore's energetic comic performances as Laura Petrie, begun at age 24 (11 years Van Dyke's junior), made both the actress and her signature tight capri pants extremely popular, and she became internationally known.
In 1970, after having appeared earlier in a pivotal one-hour musical special called Dick Van Dyke and the Other Woman, Moore and husband Grant Tinker successfully pitched a sitcom centered on Moore to CBS -- the now-legendary The Mary Tyler Moore Show. It proved so popular that three other regular characters -- Valerie Harper as Rhoda Morgenstern, Cloris Leachman as Phyllis Lindstrom and Ed Asner as Lou Grant -- were also spun off into their own series, and the premise of the single working woman's life, alternating during the program between work and home, became a television staple.
In addition to these two roles, Moore acted in multiple movies (including a notable turn as a nun opposite Elvis Presley in Change of Habit) and an Oscar-nominated role in 1980's Ordinary People. She also made several appearances in Broadway productions, and no few television movies.
Moore died at the age of 80 on January 25, 2017, at Greenwich Hospital in Greenwich, Connecticut from cardiopulmonary arrest complicated by pneumonia
- As Herself: In two episodes of Ellen in the mid-1990s.
- Emmy Award: Consistent winner starting with her first, for her role as Laura Petrie in The Dick Van Dyke Show.
- She's Got Legs: In fact, that was all she had in her first TV role, as Sam the the answering service lady in the 1950s detective series Richard Diamond, Private Detective, who was only seen from the waist down.
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