Teri Garr, the comic actress and singer who brought her buoyant personality to “Young Frankenstein” and was Oscar-nominated for “Tootsie,” died on Tuesday in Los Angeles after a long battle with multiple sclerosis. She was 79.
An influential performer to comedians including Tina Fey, Garr was a familiar face in dozens of TV shows and films of the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s. The actress revealed in 2002 that she had been diagnosed with MS, and she suffered an aneurysm in 2006.
After starting her career as a dancer, Garr first gained attention as Inga, the saucy assistant in Mel Brooks’ 1974 “Young Frankenstein,” who greeted Gene Wilder’s Dr. Frederick Frankenstein with the memorable “Vould you like to have a roll in ze hay?”
On “Friends,” she played Phoebe Abbot in three episodes in 1997 and 1998.
In Steven Spielberg’s “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” Garr was the wife of Richard Dreyfuss’ character. She netted a supporting actress Oscar nomination starring opposite Dustin Hoffman as his actress friend in Sydney Pollack’s “Tootsie,” and played the working mom to Michael Keaton’s stay-at-home dad in “Mr. Mom.”
Born in Ohio, she moved to Los Angeles, graduated North Hollywood High School, and attended Cal State Northridge before moving to New York to study acting. Starting out as a go-go dancer, she can be seen shimmying behind the performers in filmed rock concert “The T.A.M.I. Show” and in six Elvis Presley features, most choreographed by her mentor David Winters. During the 1960s, she had bit parts on sitcoms including “That Girl,” “Batman” and “The Andy Griffith Show.”
Garr’s first speaking role came in the Monkees’ offbeat feature film “Head,” written by Jack Nicholson, whom she had met in an acting class. On the “Assignment Earth” episode of “Star Trek,” she played a ditsy secretary, the first in a string of many such roles.
She became a regular singer and dancer on “The Sonny and Cher Show” before landing a role in Francis Ford Coppola’s “The Conversation.”
Coppola cast her again in “One From the Heart.” Among her other roles were the wife of John Denver’s character in “Oh, God,” the mother of the boy protagonist in “The Black Stallion” and roles in “Dumb and Dumber” and “Mom and Dad Save the World.”
Garr worked with many of the era’s most notable directors: In addition to Brooks, Spielberg, Pollack and Coppola, she worked with Martin Scorsese for “After Hours,” and Robert Altman in “The Player” and “Pret-a-Porter.” Her many TV roles included turns on “M*A*S*H,” “The Odd Couple” and “The Bob Newhart Show.”
Garr explained to the A.V. Club in a viciously frank and feminist 2008 interview why she was often cast as the “long-suffering wife” in films such as “Mr. Mom”: “If there’s ever a woman who’s smart, funny, or witty, people are afraid of that, so they don’t write that. They only write parts for women where they let everything be steamrolled over them, where they let people wipe their feet all over them. Those are the kind of parts I play, and the kind of parts that there are for me in this world. In this life.”
Despite her obvious appeal to great directors, she found many of her encounters in the business to be unbearably sexist, such as being told by “The Sonny and Cher Show” producers that if she wanted to be paid as much as the men, she could quit. “The whole world is sexist, starting with that show. That was an example of it: not getting paid what everybody else got paid for doing the same thing. So I started learning early that women are steamrolled,” she told the A.V. Club.
She hosted “Saturday Night Live” three times and appeared frequently on “The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson” and “Late Night With David Letterman.”
Her career slowed in the late 1990s, though she continued to take on small roles in films including “Dick” and “Unaccompanied Minors,” and as the voice of Mary McGinnis in two Batman animated films, “Batman Beyond: The Movie” and “Batman Beyond: Return of the Joker.”
She published an autobiography, “Speedbumps: Flooring It Through Hollywood,” in 2006.
She is survived by her daughter, Molly O’Neil, and grandson Tyryn.