Teri Garr, the quirky comedy actor who rose from being a background dancer in Elvis Presley movies to co-star in such favorites as “Young Frankenstein” and “Tootsie,” has died, CBS News confirmed. She was 79.
Garr died Tuesday of multiple sclerosis “surrounded by family and friends,” publicist Heidi Schaeffer said in a statement. Garr battled other health problems in recent years and underwent an operation in January 2007 to repair an aneurysm.
Garr, who was sometimes credited as Terri, Terry or Terry Ann during her long career, grew up in Los Angeles with two older brothers in a show business family.
Her mother, Phyllis, was a former dancer. Her dad, Eddie, was a traveling comedian and a gambler, who died when Garr was 11.
Their daughter began dance lessons at 6 and by 14 was dancing with the San Francisco and Los Angeles ballet companies.
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She was 16 when she joined the road company of “West Side Story” in Los Angeles, and as early as 1963 she began appearing in bit parts in films. She recalled in a 1988 interview how she won the “West Side Story” role. After being dropped from her first audition, she returned a day later in different clothes and was accepted.
From there, the blonde, statuesque Garr found steady work dancing in movies, and she appeared in the chorus of nine Presley films, including “Viva Las Vegas,” “Roustabout” and “Clambake.”
She also appeared on numerous television shows, including “Star Trek,” “Dr. Kildare” and “Batman,” and was a featured dancer on the rock ‘n’ roll music show “Shindig,” the rock concert performance T.A.M.I. and a cast member of “The Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour.”
Her big film break came as Gene Hackman’s girlfriend in 1974’s Francis Ford Coppola thriller “The Conversation.” That led to an interview with Mel Brooks, who said he would hire her for the role of Gene Wilder’s German lab assistant in 1974’s “Young Frankenstein” — if she could speak with a German accent.
“Cher had this German woman, Renata, making wigs, so I got the accent from her,” Garr once recalled.
The film established her as a talented comedy performer, with New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael proclaiming her “the funniest neurotic dizzy dame on the screen.”
Her big smile and off-center appeal helped land her roles in “Oh God!” opposite George Burns and John Denver, “Mr. Mom” (as Michael Keaton’s wife) and “Tootsie” in which she played the girlfriend who loses Dustin Hoffman to Jessica Lange and learns that he has dressed up as a woman to revive his career. (She also lost the supporting actress Oscar at that year’s Academy Awards to Lange.)
Although best known for comedy, Garr showed in such films as “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” “The Black Stallion” and “The Escape Artist” that she could handle drama equally well.
“I would like to play ‘Norma Rae’ and ‘Sophie’s Choice,’ but I never got the chance,” she once said, adding she had become typecast as a comic actor.
She had a flair for spontaneous humor, often playing David Letterman’s foil during guest appearances on NBC’s “Late Night With David Letterman” early in its run.
Her appearances became so frequent, and the pair’s good-natured bickering so convincing, that for a time rumors cropped up that they were romantically involved. Years later, Letterman credited those early appearances with helping make the show a hit.
Admirers took to social media Tuesday in her honor, with writer-director Paul Feig calling her “truly one of my comedy heroes. I couldn’t have loved her more” and screenwriter Cinco Paul saying: “Never the star, but always shining. She made everything she was in better.”