Mary Tyler Moore, modern woman incarnated, dies, 80
MARY Tyler Moore, whose witty and graceful performances on two top-rated television shows in the 1960s and ’70s helped define a new vision of American womanhood, died on Wednesday in Greenwich, Connecticut. She was 80.
Her family said her death was caused by cardiopulmonary arrest after she had contracted pneumonia.
Moore faced more than her share of private sorrow, and she went on to more serious fare, including an Oscar-nominated role in the 1980 film Ordinary People as a frosty, resentful mother whose son has died. But she was most indelibly known as the incomparably spunky Mary Richards on the CBS hit sitcom The Mary Tyler Moore Show. Broadcast from 1970 to 1977, it was produced by both Moore and her second husband, Grant Tinker, who died on November 28.
At least a decade before the twin figures of the harried working woman and the neurotic, unwed 30-something became media preoccupations, Moore’s portrayal – for which she won four of her seven Emmy Awards – expressed both the exuberance and the melancholy of the single career woman who could plot her own course.
The show, and her portrayal of Mary as a sisterly presence in the office, as well as a source of ingenuity and humour, was a balm to widespread anxieties about women in the workforce.
Moore had earlier, in a decidedly different era, played another beloved television character: Laura Petrie, the stylish wife of the comedy writer played by Dick Van Dyke on The Dick Van Dyke Show. Also on CBS, the show ran from 1961 to 1966. Her performance won her two Emmys.
Mary Tyler Moore was born on December 29, 1936, in New York. After living in Queens and Brooklyn, her family moved to California when she was 8. Her father, George Tyler Moore, a clerk, and her mother, the former Margery Hackett, were both alcoholics and, Moore often said, imperfect parents. While she was still a child, Moore arranged to live with an aunt, choosing to see her parents only on special occasions.
At 17 she was hired to appear in a series of commercials for Hotpoint appliances in the role of Happy Hotpoint, a caped dancing elf in a body stocking. The ad was shown during episodes of The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet.
In 1955 she married Richard Meeker, a salesman. Her only child, Richard Jr, was born in 1956. He died in 1980 when a gun with a hair trigger went off in his hands.
After the birth of her son, Moore danced in various TV shows before turning to acting. Moore’s marriage to Meeker had dissolved by 1961, and she met Tinker, who was then an executive at 20th Century Fox, in 1962. They were married, in Las Vegas, the same year. Together they formed MTM Enterprises, and in the late ’60s, they hit upon an idea for a custom-made showcase.
The characters all revolved around Mary, whose naivete and enthusiasm supplied a generous assist for the others’ eccentricities.
In Chuckles Bites the Dust, which is on many lists of the best television episodes of all time, Mary is appalled by her colleagues’ irreverent response to the undignified death of Chuckles the Clown, the host of a children’s show. But at his funeral, it’s she who cannot control her giggles. Her struggle to suppress laughter is a comic tour de force.
Among the show’s many memorable flourishes was its theme song, Love Is All Around, written and performed by Sonny Curtis. The lyrics were rewritten after the first season to reflect the show’s optimism and devotion to its star: “Who can turn the world on with her smile?/ Who can take a nothing day, and suddenly make it all seem worthwhile?”
After the show was cancelled in 1977, she set out to demonstrate her range as an actress. Her performance as the stony, guilt-ridden mother Beth Jarrett in Ordinary People brought her a Golden Globe award as well as the Academy Award nomination.
In the 1980s, Moore admitted to having a drinking problem. It had started, she said, when she was starring in The Dick Van Dyke Show and had finally reached untenable levels. Moore entered the Betty Ford Center for treatment in 1984.
In 1980 she won a Tony Award for her performance on Broadway as a quadriplegic who wanted to die in Whose Life Is It, Anyway? On television she played the cruel director of an orphanage in Stolen Babies, for which she won her seventh Emmy.
In 1995, in an interview with the New York Times, Moore was asked if she resented being asked by reporters about Mary Richards. “I think some of them may be trying to find some way to instruct, or to make a judgement about, or in some way set themselves above me,” she said.
“I’ve come to the point in my life where I don’t have to work,” she continued. “I work because I enjoy it.”
She had had Type 1 diabetes since her 30s and in 2011 underwent brain surgery to remove a benign tumour.
In 2012 the Screen Actors Guild gave Moore a lifetime achievement award. Moore and Tinker divorced in 1981, although they remained friends. In 1983 she married Robert Levine, a physician, who is her only immediate survivor.
Outside her performing career, she was chairwoman of the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation International and spoke openly about her own struggle with the disease, diagnosed in the 1960s.