In the 1982 comedy classic Tootsie, Teri Garr plays Sandy Lester, a struggling actress and close friend of Dustin Hoffman’s Michael Dorsey. Between her chosen profession and her many bad choices in men, she has been conditioned to be life’s doormat. In an early scene, she vents that she was trapped in Michael’s bathroom for a half-hour during a party while no one noticed, then admits that, yes, everyone seems to be having a good time. Later, when Michael stands her up for a dinner date, she somehow winds up apologizing to him. The big soap opera role he gets while posing as a woman was something Sandy wanted, but when she shows up at the audition, the casting director takes one look at her and won’t even let her read.
On the one hand, it is hard to come away from watching Garr’s performance in that film — for which she received her one and only Oscar nomination(*) — and imagine anyone ever turning her away from an audition, or her ever needing to be so meek. In a role that could so easily be thankless and shrill, where Sandy is nothing more than a self-loathing, inadvertent obstacle between Michael and the romance he really wants, Garr is a force of nature — so funny and so vulnerable that you can’t help loving Sandy despite (or because of?) her abundant neuroses.
(*) She lost to her co-star, Jessica Lange, even though Garr gives the far more memorable performance. But Lange was nominated for both supporting and lead actress that year, and there was no way her excellent work in the movie Frances was going to beat Meryl Streep in Sophie’s Choice, so the voters gave her the supporting trophy as a consolation prize.
On the other hand, while Garr, who died this week at age 79 after a long battle with multiple sclerosis, had a far more successful career than Sandy, it never worked out quite the way it should have given her prodigious talent. She had a legitimate run as a movie leading lady in the early-to-mid-Eighties, but her big hits tended to be the projects where someone else was the star. Mr. Mom, for example, as the title would suggest, was more about Garr’s onscreen husband Michael Keaton struggling as a stay-at-home dad (a novelty in 1983!) than it was about her character’s bumpy return to the workplace. The films built around Garr, meanwhile, such as the Francis Ford Coppola musical One From the Heart, tended to come and go without much notice from audiences.
She was a one-of-a-kind talent, but in a way that was almost too specific for her own good. When no one else is doing quite what you do — frazzled, neurotic, and sexy, but also oddly innocent — it means no one else will beat you out for those kinds of parts. It also means that those kinds of parts are going to be a lot harder to come by.
There was something both timeless and unstuck-in-time about Garr. She did a lot of episodic TV-guest work in the Sixties, never quite breaking through — the closest she came was a failed attempt at a Star Trek spinoff where she would have played the daffy secretary to time-traveler Gary Seven — and later was cast as characters who seemed like fugitives from that decade. In Martin Scorsese’s cult classic After Hours, for instance, she plays Julie, a fragile waitress with a beehive haircut who dances to The Monkees’ “Last Train to Clarksville.” (Not long after, she appeared in a retro video for the Zombies hit, “She’s Not There,” again feeling very much of the period when the song had come out 22 years earlier.)
Her big career breakout came in one of the all-time-great movie years, 1974, when she gave a pair of wildly different supporting performances. The more famous one is in Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein, where she plays Inga, lab assistant to Gene Wilder’s Frederick Frankenstein. In her portrayal, Inga is either completely oblivious to how her appearance and hypersexualized demeanor affect the men around her, or a master at pretending like she is:
But Garr also struck a chord in her brief appearance in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation, in which she played Amy, mistress to Gene Hackman’s surveillance expert Harry Caul, and the only person who seems to understand him even a little:
One performance is marvelously cartoonish, the other completely buttoned-down, and both are indelible. Hollywood took notice but still didn’t entirely know what to do with Garr’s off-kilter energy. She spent a lot of time playing wives and moms in other people’s stories, sometimes to great effect (even knowing that Richard Dreyfuss is right that aliens are real in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, it’s hard to watch Garr’s work as his unnerved wife and not feel complete sympathy for her point of view), sometimes less so (she played third fiddle to George Burns and John Denver in the first Oh, God! film).
She steals every minute she’s onscreen in Tootsie, even when sharing it with both Hoffman and Bill Murray, like this incredible sequence where Sandy finally works up the nerve to confront Michael about all the lies she thinks he’s been telling her:
Garr got the Oscar nomination, had huge hits in that and Mr. Mom, and was a staple on The Tonight Show and Late Night With David Letterman throughout the Eighties. In some ways, talk shows proved the purest medium to capture all the things that made her so wonderful and distinctive. When she was alternatively flirting with Letterman and growing frustrated with him, it was impossible to tell how much was a bit and how much was the real Garr. But like Albert Brooks and some other Hall of Fame talk-show guests, it became a masterful performance in and of itself.
Her quick wit and effervescence never quite translated to prolonged commercial success, though. Garr’s last studio film as a lead was 1992’s quickly-forgotten Mom and Dad Save the World. She announced in 2002 that she had been diagnosed with MS, suffered a brain aneurysm in 2007, and retired from acting not long after.
The last decade and a half of Garr’s career was spent primarily in television, including a recurring role on Friends that felt like a spiritual passing of the torch. In her portrayal of kooky masseuse-musician Phoebe Buffay, Lisa Kudrow was clearly paying homage to Garr. (In a statement to Rolling Stone this week, Kudrow called Garr “a comedic acting genius who was and is a huge influence on me.”) The link between Kudrow’s work on the Nineties smash-hit sitcom and Garr’s film work in the Seventies and Eighties was so overt, in fact, that viewers clamored for Garr to play Phoebe’s mom. Eventually, though Phoebe’s backstory dictated that her mother had died by suicide, the writers found the comedic pairing too charmed to pass up. They devised a workaround wherein Phoebe learns that she had been adopted, allowing Garr to enter the narrative as Phoebe’s birth mother and bring her endearing goofiness to a new generation.
If it felt bittersweet that another actor had become a superstar playing a persona similar to the one that brought Garr more limited fame, it was also something of a validation: Garr’s ephemeral qualities did translate, both to another actor and to tens of millions of Friends fans who loved Phoebe, and who could see the through line from Garr to Kudrow in their episodes together. Garr was her own thing for a very long time, and it was delightful. Her legacy is the imprint she left on generations of comedy.