VALERIE HARPER

(22 August 1939 - 30 August 2019)

The American actress Valerie Harper, who has died aged 80 from brain cancer, began her career as a dancer at Radio City Hall, progressing to acting and comedy on stage and television. She will, however, be best remembered as the titular star of her TV comedy show Rhoda, a spin-off from The Mary Tyler Moore Show, in which she played a Jewish girl with romantic problems. Her mother was the always brilliant Nancy Walker who, as Ida Morgenstern, was possibly the most annoying Jewish mother ever. Together Harper and Walker were a great team, batting comic lines off each other during the show’s run from 1974 to 1978. Prior to that, Valerie Harper had been on TV in The Doctors, Columbo and Story Theatre, etc. She had already been in films from 1956 (Rock, Rock, Rock! and Li’l Abner) but her first part of note was as Bean’s wife in Freebie and the Bean (1974), starring Alan Arkin. After Rhoda she was in Neil Simon’s Chapter Two, The Last Married Couple in America with George Segal, and Stanley Donen’s Blame It On Rio with Michael Caine. In 2007 she played Golda Meir in Golda’s Balcony after which came the rather more forgettable Certainty, Shiver and The Town That Came A-Courtin’. Otherwise it was more television including The Love Boat, City, Perry Mason, Missing Persons, Melrose Place, Sex and the City, Desperate Housewives and Valerie, a short-lived series in which she played a working mother looking after her kids while hubby was away. There was also a TV movie, Mary and Rhoda, with Tyler Moore and Harper in 2000. Her last work was voice-overs for The Simpsons and American Dad! She won an Emmy and a Golden Globe for her performance in Rhoda. Valerie Harper, an avid supporter of equal rights charities, was first married to the actor Richard Schaal and then, from 1987, to the actor-producer Tony Cacciotti. She became the mother of Cristina Cacciotti, the daughter she adopted with her second husband.

MICHAEL DARVELL