Teri Garr, Beloved Star of Tootsie and Young Frankenstein, Passes Away at 79.Linh

Teri Garr, Beloved Star of Tootsie and Young Frankenstein, Passes Away at 79.Linh

Teri Garr has died at the age of 79.

Garr acted widely in film and television, with over 140 credits. She was most famous for her comedic work in movies like 1974’s Young Frankenstein and 1982’s Tootsie, for which she was nominated for an Academy Award. In 2002, Garr revealed that she had been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis.

Garr died Tuesday of the disease “surrounded by family and friends,” publicist Heidi Schaeffer told PEOPLE.

Garr was born in Ohio in 1944. Both her parents worked in show business: Her father was a vaudeville performer, while her mother was a Rockette who eventually worked in costume production. The family, which also included her two older brothers, moved to New Jersey before settling in Los Angeles. Garr’s father died when she was 11.

“She put two kids through school,” Garr told the Los Angeles Times of her mom in 2008. “I have one brother who is a surgeon, there’s me, and my other brother builds boats. She was in wardrobe. She was a costumer at the studio. She would always say, ‘We’re still alive. . . .’”

Garr started training as a dancer, with an emphasis on ballet. She dropped out of college to move to New York to focus on acting, where she studied at the Actors Studio and the Lee Strasberg Theatre and Film Institute.

Her earliest projects allowed her to use her dancing skills. She appeared in six movies starring Elvis Presley, including 1964’s Viva Las Vegas. She also appeared on TV variety shows as a dancer.

“I got sick and fed up of dancing in the chorus,” she told Roger Ebert in 1980. “I trained for 10 years. I finally asked myself, ‘Why am I not in the front? I didn’t study all those years to be in the back and get no money.’”

She continued, “But I was shy and sweet. So I started going to the shrink and I learned how to talk to people. Directors would tell me, ‘We want you to play a character a little less complex than you are.’ Yeah, sure. What they mean is, ‘You’re playing a dummy.'”

Her first speaking role came in the The Monkees 1968 film Head. It was written by Jack Nicholson, whom she’d met in acting class. That same year, she appeared in an episode of Star Trek, “Assignment: Earth,” which was her first major speaking role. She also became a regular on The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour in 1972.

Soon Garr began to find major success. In 1974, she appeared in Francis Ford Coppola’s thriller The Conversation. That same year, she starred in the Mel Brooks horror comedy Young Frankenstein as Inga, Dr. Frankenstein’s assistant — a role she secured with some help from her mom.

“My mother was the wardrobe woman on Young Frankenstein,” she told PBS in 2012. “I asked her if they’d finished casting, and she said she didn’t know.” Garr asked her agent to get her an audition, and after four rounds of auditions, she was cast. “It was unbelievable.” Her time on Sonny & Cher helped her nail the role. “I got the German accent from Cher’s wig lady,” she revealed.

Three years later, she starred in Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind, which let her flex her dramatic skills. Then in 1982, she starred alongside Dustin Hoffman in Tootsie. Film critic Pauline Kael called Garr “the funniest neurotic dizzy dame on the screen.” She received an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress for the film, but lost to her Tootsie costar Jessica Lange.

Garr’s other major film roles at the time included 1981’s One From the Heart, 1983’s Mr. Mom, 1985’s After Hours and 1992’s Mom and Dad Save the World. But in a comedy world that was dominated by men, Garr had to push for more depth in her roles; she wasn’t always successful.

“I tried to make the character a little more real,” she told The Washington Post in 1983 about her part in Mr. Mom. “And they stopped me dead in my tracks. You don’t have to have too much of a brain in this business to realize that the only way you’ll ever get to do anything that you really want to do is to become a director.”

On television, she appeared on shows like McCloud, M*A*S*H, The Bob Newhart Show, The Odd Couple, Maude and Barnaby Jones. She hosted Saturday Night Live three times, in 1980, 1983 and 1985. Garr was a frequent guest on both The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson and Late Night with David Letterman, though she told Roger Ebert in 1988 that her Letterman appearances — where she often filled in for canceled guests — probably kept her from landing more serious parts.

“I went on the Letterman show the first time to plug something, and then I came back as the Fool, the court jester,” she said. Ebert noted that Garr was one of the only Letterman guests who could “put dents in his aplomb.”

Later roles for Garr included parts in Casper Meets Wendy, the Designing Women spinoff series Women of the House, Dick and Ghost World. She also appeared on Friends as Phoebe’s birth mother.

Garr revealed in 2002 that during the 1990s she had been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. She first began noticing symptoms while filming One From the Heart and Tootsie.

She released a memoir, Speedbumps: Flooring It Through Hollywood, in 2006, where she opened up about her illness. “MS is a sneaky disease,” she wrote in an excerpt published by PEOPLE. “Like some of my boyfriends, it has a tendency to show up at the most awkward times and then disappear entirely. It would take over 20 years for doctors to figure out what was wrong. Sometimes they mentioned MS, but all the tests came back clear. Then the symptoms would fade away and I’d forget about it, sort of.”

Gossip about her diagnosis before she went public hurt her career. “Whatever this MS was, the industry wanted no part of it,” she wrote. “At first I was outraged. Whatever was going on in my body had been going on for years. It never got in the way of my work. Then I started thinking the job offers disappeared because I stunk as an actress. It was a tough trio: mysterious symptoms, my insecurities about my acting ability, and the reality of being an ‘aging’ actress.”

Garr became a national ambassador for the National Multiple Sclerosis Society and national chair for the Society’s Women Against MS program. She limited the number of projects she appeared in and retired from acting in 2011.

“Slowing down is so not in my nature, but I have to,” she told Brain & Life Magazine in 2005. “Stress and anxiety and all those high-tension things are not good for MS.”

Garr married John O’Neil in 1993. Together they adopted daughter Molly. The couple split in 1996.

She is survived by her daughter Molly O’Neil, 30, and grandson Tyryn, 6.