Tootsie and Young Frankenstein actress Teri Garr dies at age 79
The Oscar-nominated actress also appeared in Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and on TV series like Star Trek and Batman
Academy Award-nominated comedy actress Teri Garr, whose sunny personality lit up the screen in films such as Young Frankenstein and Tootsie, died on Tuesday at age 79.
Garr, who earned an Oscar nomination for her role opposite Dustin Hoffman in the 1982 gender-swap comedy Tootsie, died in Los Angeles from complications of multiple sclerosis, publicist Heidi Schaeffer said.
The actress disclosed in 2002 that she had been diagnosed with MS after experiencing symptoms for some two decades. She became an advocate for MS research and treatment. In 2007, Garr underwent surgery for a brain aneurysm and used a wheelchair for a time.
“I had to learn to walk again, to talk again and to think again, which I’m not even sure is necessary in Hollywood,” she joked in an interview in 2008.
Teri Ann Garr was born on December 11, 1944 in the Cleveland suburb of Lakewood, Ohio, to show-business parents: her father, Eddie, was a vaudeville performer and actor who appeared on Broadway and her mother, Phyllis, danced at New York’s Radio City Music Hall as one of the Rockettes.
After attending college in Los Angeles, Garr moved to New York to pursue a career in ballet and then in acting, studying at the famed Actor’s Studio in Manhattan.
