TERI GARR
(11 December 1944 - 29 October 2024)
The American actress Teri Garr, who has died at the age of 79 from the effects of multiple sclerosis, was good at playing ditzy women who didn’t quite know who or where they were. She brightened up any scene she was in, be it as Inga in Young Frankenstein, the bemused mother in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, the wife of the cross-dressing Tootsie, or Phoebe’s mum in Friends. Teri Garr was born in Los Angeles to a show business family, mother Phyllis, a Rockette dancer, and her father, Eddie, who worked mostly in vaudeville. The family, with sons Ed and Phil, were brought up near Cleveland, Ohio, but moved to New Jersey before settling in Los Angeles. Teri’s father died when she was eleven, but mother Phyllis managed a college education for her children. Teri enjoyed dance, so would practice up to four hours a day. She graduated and attended California State University but left after two years to study at the Actors Studio in New York.
At first she was known as Terry Garr but later changed her forename to Teri. Her first film was A Swingin’ Affair (1963), a college drama. Sticking with youth she danced in Pajama Party and some TV pop shows plus six Elvis Presley movies, the best being Viva Las Vegas. After a tour of West Side Story, she had a part in Head (1968), The Monkees movie written by Jack Nicholson whom she knew from the Actors Studio. Most of her career then saw her in popular TV shows, Saturday Night Live and The Late Show, or with Dick Van Dyke, Bob Newhart, Larry Sanders, on Sesame Street, Jeopardy!, Hollywood Squares, etc. Better films began with Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation with Gene Hackman, then Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein playing Inga, a servant at the Baron’s castle, in a hilarious send-up of 1930s monochrome horror movies, with engaging turns by Gene Wilder, Marty Feldman, Cloris Leachman, Madeline Kahn and Peter Boyle as the monster who sings ‘Puttin’ on the Ritz’. Steven Spielberg cast her as the wife of a man (Richard Dreyfuss) obsessed with UFOs in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, the third highest-grossing movie of 1977. Then she did Oh, God! with George Burns and John Denver and The Black Stallion. Coppola was a producer on the latter and Garr also did the sequel, The Black Stallion Returns. Sydney Pollack’s Tootsie was about an out-of-work actor (Dustin Hoffman) who, to get a part in a soap opera, disguised himself as a woman (in an awkward situation, his ex-girlfriend (Garr), discovers him about to try on her clothes). The film was an enormous hit and secured nine Oscar nominations, including a best supporting nod for Garr. Teri Garr also appeared in Martin Scorsese’s After Hours, Coppola’s musical One From the Heart, Robert Altman’s The Player (as herself), Waiting for the Light with Shirley MacLaine, Dumb and Dumber with Jim Carrey, Altman’s Pret-a-Porter and Nora Ephron’s Michael with John Travolta as an Archangel.
In 2002 Garr contracted multiple sclerosis that involved months of rehabilitation to recover her speech and movement. Then in 2006 she suffered a brain aneurysm resulting in a coma, although therapy helped her regain her health. From 2005 she made a few films and some TV shows. She had a long relationship with the producer Roger Birnbaum in the 1980s, then she was with David Kipper, a doctor, and in 1993 she married the building contractor John O’Neal and they adopted a daughter, Molly. They divorced in 1996. In 2006 she wrote her memoir, Speedbumps: Flooring It Through Hollywood.
MICHAEL DARVELL