Teri Garr, the actress, who has died aged 79, began her film career as a dancer in Elvis Presley musicals and went on to appear in scene-stealing roles in films including Mel Brooks’s Young Frankenstein (1974) and Sydney Pollack’s Tootsie (1982), for which she won an Oscar nomination.
Bouncy and blonde, Teri Garr cultivated a wild-eyed ditzy persona, verging on the unhinged: a New Yorker critic described her as “perhaps the funniest, most neurotic dizzy dame on the screen”. Naturally witty, she somehow always managed to be in on the joke, but she was also capable of giving her characters emotional depth – a combination which made them memorably funny.
Her first major starring role was as Inga, the busty Teutonic lab assistant in Young Frankenstein, Mel Brooks’s homage to 1930s horror films, alongside Gene Wilder’s mad scientist and Marty Feldman as his bug-eyed manservant, Igor.
Her agent had advised her not to audition for the role as she was still a comparative unknown. But her mother, working as a costume designer on the film, told her that Brooks had not yet found a suitable Inga.
“When I read the part, I realized it was all about the boobs, and I was not about to let my lack of them hinder my performance,” Teri Garr wrote in her memoir, Speedbumps (2005, with Henriette Mantel). So when she went for the audition in a fluffy pink jumper, she crammed her bra with stockings and won the part. “People pay more than $5,000 for a boob job today,” she observed. “Mine cost under $5 at Woolworth’s.”
“When I saw her, absolutely beautiful, I asked Wilder if she could act,” Mel Brooks recalled. “ ‘Who cares about that?’ Gene replied.”