R.I.P. Teri Garr, Academy Award-nominated star of Tootsie, Young Frankenstein, and many more

Teri Garr, the Oscar-nominated actor best known for her roles in Tootsie, Young Frankenstein, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and more, died Tuesday after living with MS for more than two decades. The news was confirmed by Variety. Garr was 79.

Garr was born in 1944 to parents who both worked in entertainment—her father was a vaudeville performer and her mother was a Rockette. She started her career as a go-go dancer performing on various variety shows and in several Elvis Presley films before landing her first speaking role in a feature film in The Monkees’ Head—written by Jack Nicholson—in 1968. The same year, she also accepted her first major role in a television series, playing Roberta Lincoln in Star Trek episode “Assignment: Earth.” 

In 1972, Garr became a regular on The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour, but it was in 1974 that she had her real breakout. That year, she starred in both Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation and Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein, in which she memorably played Dr. Frankenstein’s assistant, Inga. “I had no idea it was going to be such a big hit, and it’s still hot,” Garr shared with The A.V. Club of the Brooks film in a 2008 Random Roles interview. “It really was the first time I ever had my name on the poster, co-starring and all that stuff. So I’m really grateful that I was even in it, that I came back with that German accent.” (In the same interview, she also explained that she based the accent—which led to the catchphrase “Vould you like to have a roll in ze hay?”—on Cher’s wigmaker from Düsseldorf.)

From there, Garr went on to work with a cadre of esteemed directors, including Steven Spielberg on Close Encounters Of The Third Kind (1977), Martin Scorsese on After Hours (1985), Robert Altman on The Player (1992) and Pret-A-Porter (1994), Carl Reiner on Oh, God! (1977), and Coppola again on One From The Heart (1981). She scored her Oscar nomination in 1983 for her role as actress Sandy Lester in Sydney Pollack’s Tootsie, a movie she did not look fondly back on in her Random Roles. “I thought that [Sandy] was caught between trying to have a career and trying to be a sexual woman, and it just doesn’t work. At least it didn’t in that movie, because it was made by sexist men,” she said. “I can say that now, because Sydney [Pollack] isn’t with us anymore. [Laughs.] But he was a fine director.”

Garr also had a number of notable television performances, including roles in M*A*S*H, The Odd Couple, The Bob Newhart Show, and later, Friends. Still, she spoke out about experiencing the same sort of misogyny on television as she did in the movies. “The whole world is sexist, starting with that show,” she said of Sonny & Cher. “That was an example of it: not getting paid what everybody else got paid for doing the same thing. It was six guys and me who did all the sketches, and I was the only woman, and I got half of what they made… I started learning early that women are steamrolled. You can quote me on this.”

Garr revealed her MS diagnosis in 2002. She officially retired from acting in 2011, five years after publishing her autobiography, Speedbumps: Flooring It Through Hollywood, in 2006. She is survived by her daughter, Molly O’Neil, and her grandson, Tyryn.