Teri Garr

Terry Ann Garr (December 11, 1944 – October 29, 2024), known as Teri Garr, was an American actress, comedian and dancer. Known for her comedic roles in film and television in the 1970s and 1980s, she often played women struggling to cope with the life-changing experiences of their husbands, children or boyfriends. She received nominations for an Academy Award and a British Academy Film Award for her performance in Tootsie (1982), playing a struggling actress who loses the soap opera role of a female hospital administrator to her male friend and acting coach.

Garr was raised primarily in North Hollywood, California. She was the third child of a comedic-actor father and a studio costumier mother. In her youth, Garr trained in ballet and other forms of dance. She began her career as a teenager with small roles in television and film in the early 1960s, including appearances as a dancer in nine Elvis Presley musicals. After spending two years attending college, Garr left Los Angeles and studied acting at the Lee Strasberg Institute in New York City. She had her breakthrough appearing in the episode Assignment: Earth of Star Trek in 1968.

After gaining attention for her 1974 roles in Francis Ford Coppola's thriller The Conversation and Mel Brooks's comedy horror Young Frankenstein, Garr became increasingly successful with major roles in Carl Reiner's comedy Oh, God! and Steven Spielberg's science fiction film Close Encounters of the Third Kind (both 1977) and The Black Stallion (1979). In the 1980s, she was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her comedic role as an acting student in Sydney Pollack's romantic comedy Tootsie, and enjoyed leading roles in Coppola's musical drama One from the Heart (1982), Mr. Mom (1983), and Firstborn (1984). She later acted in films such as Martin Scorsese's black comedy After Hours (1985), Let It Ride (1989), Dumb and Dumber (1994), Prêt-à-Porter (1994), Michael (1996), and Ghost World (2001).

Garr's quick wit and charming banter made her a sought-after guest on late-night shows such as The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson and Late Night with David Letterman. On television, she took a guest role as Phoebe Abbott in the sitcom Friends (1997–98). In 2002, Garr announced that she had been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, the symptoms of which had affected her ability to perform. She retired from acting in 2011 and died in 2024.

Early life and education

Terry Ann Garr was born in Los Angeles, California, on December 11, 1944. She spent her early years in Franklin Lakes, New Jersey, and Lakewood, Ohio, before her family settled in Los Angeles. Her father, Eddie Garr (born Edward Leo Gonnoud), was a vaudeville performer, comedian, and actor, whose career peaked when he briefly took over the lead role in the Broadway drama Tobacco Road. Her mother, Phyllis Lind Garr (born Emma Schmotzer), was a dancer, a Rockette, wardrobe mistress, and model. Her father was of Irish descent and her maternal grandparents were Austrian immigrants. Garr had two older brothers, Ed and Phil.

When Garr was 11, her father died in Los Angeles of a heart attack. She recalled that his death "left us bereft, without any kind of income. And I saw my mother be this incredibly strong, creative woman who put three kids through college—one of my brothers is a surgeon. Any kind of lessons we wanted, we had to have scholarships or sweep the floors. It had to be free. And so we always had to try harder. That was instilled in me very early." During her youth, Garr expressed interest in dancing and trained extensively in ballet. "I'd go for three, four hours a day; my feet would be bleeding", she recalled. "I'd take buses all over the city just to go to the best dancing schools. You could just stand there and be quiet and beat yourself up, push the body." Garr graduated from North Hollywood High School, and attended San Fernando Valley State College for two years before dropping out and relocating to New York City to further pursue acting. In New York City, she studied at the Actors Studio and the Lee Strasberg Theatre and Film Institute.

Career

Early films and stage

Early in her career, she was credited as Terry Garr. She later recalled changing her first name to "Teri" on the advice of a numerologist, who said she would be unsuccessful if she had repeating letters in her first and last names. Her movie debut was as an extra in A Swingin' Affair (1963). During her senior year, she auditioned for the cast of the Los Angeles road company production of West Side Story, where she met one of the most important people in her early career, David Winters, who became her friend, dance teacher, and mentor. Winters cast her in many of his early movies and projects.

Garr began as a background go-go dancer in uncredited roles in youth-oriented films and TV shows choreographed by Winters, including Pajama Party (a beach party film), the T.A.M.I. Show, Shivaree, Hullabaloo, Movin' with Nancy, Shindig! and nine Elvis Presley features (many of which were also choreographed by Winters, including Presley's most profitable film, Viva Las Vegas). When asked in a magazine interview about how she landed jobs in so many Presley films, Garr answered, "One of the dancers in the road show of West Side Story (David Winters) started to choreograph movies, and whatever job he got, I was one of the girls he'd hire. So he was chosen to do Viva Las Vegas. That was my first movie."

She often appeared on television during this time, performing as a go-go dancer on several musical variety shows, along with friend Toni Basil, such as Shindig! and Hullabaloo. In 1966, Garr made one appearance on Batman (episode seven, uncredited). In 1968, she appeared in both The Andy Griffith Show and Mayberry R.F.D. and was in two episodes of It Takes a Thief.

Film and television; critical acclaim

Her first speaking role in a motion picture was a brief appearance as a damsel in distress in The Monkees' film Head (1968), written by Jack Nicholson; Garr got the role after meeting Nicholson in an acting class. "He wrote the script for Head, so all of us in the class got little tiny parts in the movie," she recalled. "I was ... Who was I? Oh yes, I was the girl dying of a snakebite, who falls off the Conestoga wagon and says, 'Quick, suck it before the venom reaches my heart!' " Earlier in that year, she landed her first significant TV role, featured as secretary Roberta Lincoln in the Star Trek episode "Assignment: Earth", designed as a backdoor pilot episode for a new series that was not commissioned. "Star Trek was the first job where I had a fairly big (for me) speaking part," Garr related in her memoir, "I played Roberta Lincoln, a dippy secretary in a pink and orange costume with a very short skirt. Had the spin-off succeeded, I would have continued on as an earthling agent, working to preserve humanity. In a very short skirt." This led to her being, in her words, "cast as birdbrained lasses," in episodes of other TV shows.

In 1972, she landed a regular role in The Ken Berry "WOW" Show, a summer replacement series. Afterward, she was a regular cast member on The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour, dancing and acting in comedy sketches.

Garr appeared in a string of highly successful films in the mid-to-late 1970s, including a supporting role in Francis Ford Coppola's thriller The Conversation (1974). This was followed with her role as Inga, an assistant to Dr. Frederick Frankenstein, in the Mel Brooks horror comedy Young Frankenstein (1974), which marked a career breakthrough. She then appeared in a dramatic role in Steven Spielberg's science-fiction film Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) as the wife of Richard Dreyfuss's character; in Oh, God! (1977) as the wife of John Denver's character; and the drama The Black Stallion (1979) as the mother of the boy protagonist.

In 1978, Garr appeared off-Broadway in a production of One Crack Out by Canadian playwright David French, playing the wife of Charlie, a pool hustler in Toronto. Richard Eder of The New York Times noted that Garr "manages an attractive uncertainty and devotion as Charlie's wife."

In 1982, she starred opposite Dustin Hoffman in the comedy Tootsie (1982), playing an actress whose actor friend (Hoffman) disguises himself as a woman to further his career. For her role, she was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. She then appeared in the comedy Mr. Mom (1983) as the wife of Michael Keaton's character, followed by a supporting role in Martin Scorsese's After Hours (1985).

Later work and television

In the 1970s, Garr had a recurring role on McCloud, and appeared on M*A*S*H, The Bob Newhart Show, The Odd Couple, Maude, Barnaby Jones, and Paul Sand in Friends and Lovers. She hosted Saturday Night Live three times (in 1980, 1983, and 1985), and was a frequent visitor on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, appearing over 40 times.