Comedian and singer Teri Karr, who brought her extravagant persona to “Young Frankenstein” and was nominated for an Oscar for “Tootsie,” died Tuesday in Los Angeles after a long battle with multiple sclerosis. She is 79 years old.
He was an influential actor in dozens of television shows and movies of the 1970s, 80s and 90s, including Tina Fey. The actress revealed that she was diagnosed with MS in 2002 and suffered an aneurysm in 2006.
After beginning her career as a dancer, Carr first gained attention as the saucy assistant Inga in Mel Brooks’ 1974 film “Young Frankenstein,” playing Gene Wilder’s Dr. Frederic greets Frankenstein. ?”
On “Friends,” she played Phoebe Abbott in three episodes in 1997 and 1998.
In Steven Spielberg’s “Close Encounters of the Third Kind”, Carr was the wife of Richard Dreyfus’ character. She received supporting actress Oscar nominations for playing her actress friend opposite Dustin Hoffman in Sidney Pollock’s “Tootsie,” and Michael Keaton’s “Mr. Mom.”
Born in Ohio, she moved to Los Angeles, graduated from North Hollywood High School, and attended Cal State Northridge before moving to New York to study acting. Beginning as a go-go dancer, she can be seen shimmering behind performers choreographed by her mentor, David Winters, in the filmed rock concert “The Tommy Show” and six Elvis Presley features. During the 1960s, he had bit parts in sitcoms including “That Girl,” “Batman” and “The Andy Griffith Show.”
Carr’s first speaking role came in the Monkees’ offbeat film “Head,” written by Jack Nicholson, whom he met in acting class. In the “Assignment Earth” episode of “Star Trek,” she played a ditzy secretary, the first of many such roles.
She became a regular singer and dancer on “The Sonny and Cher Show” before starring in Francis Ford Coppola’s “The Conversation.”
Coppola cast her again in “One from the Heart.” Her other roles include the wife of John Denver’s character in “Oh, God,” the mother of the boy protagonist in “The Black Stallion,” and roles in “Dumb and Dumber” and “Mom and Dad Save the World.”
Carr worked with many of the most notable directors of the era: in addition to Brooks, Spielberg, Pollock and Coppola, he worked with Martin Scorsese on “After Hours” and Robert Altman on “The Player” and “Pret-a-Porter”. His many TV roles include “M*A*S*H,” “The Odd Couple” and “The Bob Newhart Show.”
Kar explained AV Club In a notoriously frank and feminist 2008 interview, “Mr. Mom”: “If there’s ever a woman who’s smart, funny, or funny, people are afraid of it, so they don’t write it. They only write parts for women, where they let everything boil over them, The parts that I play there are the parts that belong to me in this life.”
Despite her open appeal to top directors, several encounters were unbearably sexual, such as when the producers of “The Sonny and Cher Show” told her that if they wanted to pay her the same as men, she could. get out “From that show on, the whole world is sexist. That’s an example: Not everyone gets paid for doing the same thing. So I started learning early on that women are steamrolled,” she told AV Club.
He hosted “Saturday Night Live” three times and appeared frequently on “The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson” and “Late Night with David Letterman.”
In the late 1990s she took a break, though she appeared in small roles in “Dick” and “Unaccompanied Minors” and as the voice of Mary McGinnis in two Batman animated films, “Batman Beyond: The Movie” and “Batman Beyond: Return of the Joker.”
He published an autobiography, “Speedpumps: Flooring It Through Hollywood” in 2006.
He is survived by his daughter Molly O’Neill and grandson Tyrin.
