In some sad news today, actress Teri Garr has passed away at the age of 79. Two of her best-known roles were in the 20th Century Fox (now the Disney-owned 20th Century Studios) films Mr. Mom and Young Frankenstein.
Mel Brooks’s Young Frankenstein (1974) is considered a modern-classic comedy/horror film that served as a spot-on parody of the 1930s James Whale Frankenstein movies, in which Garr played the role of Inga opposite Gene Wilder. In the 1983 comedy Mr. Mom, she starred alongside Michael Keaton as Caroline Butler. For Disney proper, she appeared in supporting roles in the television series Adventures In Wonderland and Mother Goose Rock 'n' Rhyme, both on the Disney Channel. Other famous non-Disney roles Teri Garr inhabited were as Ronnie Neary (the put-upon wife of Richard Dreyfuss’s character Roy Neary) in Steven Spielberg’s 1977 science-fiction masterpiece Close Encounters of the Third Kind and as Sandy Lester in Sydney Pollack’s beloved 1982 romantic comedy Tootsie with Dustin Hoffman.
Teri Garr was born in Cleveland, Ohio in 1944 and eventually raised in Los Angeles, California– the daughter of vaudeville comedian Eddie Garr and Rockette Phyllis Garr– and began her acting career as a teenager. She considered her big break in Hollywood to be when she landed a role on the original Star Trek series in the 1960s. Afterwards, she was cast in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation, and the rest was history. Through her career she was nominated for an Academy Award (for Best Supporting Actress for her role Tootsie) a Saturn Award (Best Supporting Actress for Closer Encounters), a BAFTA Award, a CableACE Award, and more. “So very sorry to hear about Teri Garr’s passing,” said filmmaker and comedian Mel Brooks via X. “She was so talented and so funny. Her humor and lively spirit made the Young Frankenstein set a pleasure to work on. Her ‘German’ accent had us all in stitches! She will be greatly missed.”
