Obituary: Teri Garr

The actress and her exceptional and enduring talent and career

Born in the Midwest—Teri Garr’s from Ohio—and raised in the San Fernando Valley, her father, Eddie, sang and danced in Vaudeville and her mother, Phyllis, had danced as a Rockette at New York City’s Radio City Music Hall, which may explain the ease with which Garr performed. Her natural style comes through in every role. From her 1974 comic performance as Inga in Mel Brooks’ silly Young Frankenstein to Dustin Hoffman’s title character’s jilted lover Sandy in Sydney Pollack’s Tootsie, she was a comedienne with an everywoman sensibility. Garr’s Tootsie character, in particular, sets up the theme.

Garr shows range. As the closest to the movie’s villainess—after the U.S. government—in Steven Spielberg’s 1977 masterpiece, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, she contrasts Roy the freethinker presumed to be going mad (portrayed by Richard Dreyfuss). Gently comedic at first, Garr’s myopic mother and wife comes undone in a realistic way with a dramatic effect, which elevates the film and its unlikely, ordinary hero, a utility worker, shifting the plot-theme into an amazing blend of thrill, alarm and seriousness. Garr’s abandoning wife puts everything Roy holds dear in peril.

Starting her movie career as a dancer in Elvis Presley films, such as Viva Las Vegas (1964), Garr go-go danced on TV and danced beside Gene Kelly, gradually settling in as female helpmate. Whether as working woman to Michael Keaton’s Mr. Mom (1983), John Denver’s wife in Oh, God! (1977), Raul Julia’s lover in Francis Ford Coppola’s 1981 musical One From the Heart (1981) or Gene Hackman’s lover in Mr. Coppola’s surveillance-themed The Conversation (1974), Teri Garr represents the feminine American woman; her screen persona sparkles. In 1999, she was diagnosed with the chronic, degenerative neurological disease, multiple sclerosis, which impaired her ability which, to her credit, she disclosed and discussed. The actress later endured emergency surgery for an aneurysm. Teri Garr was 79 (she would’ve been 80 on December 11) when she died in Los Angeles on October 29.

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