Teri Garr, Beloved Actress Who Made Audiences Laugh in ‘Young Frankenstein’ and ‘Tootsie,’ Dead at 79
Christian Blauvelt
Teri Garr, beloved actress and comic of stage and screen, is dead at the age of 79. In the last decades of her life, she became an inspirational figure for those, like her, diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, tirelessly working to raise awareness of the disease as a frequent speaker at the annual Race to Erase MS events.
As much as as she inspired people in her last years, she made people smile and laugh throughout her four-decade career on stage and screen as one of the funniest actresses of her generation, in films such as “Young Frankenstein” and “Tootsie.” She was one of the harder-working people in show business, coming up via true bit parts: She was a background dancer in 1964 teen-focused concert film “The T.A.M.I. Show” and even played the Statue of Liberty in a stage production at Walt Disney World when it opened in 1971.
The park’s entertainment coordinator Forrest Bahruth, said to this writer in EW, that when they were casting the part of the Statue of Liberty for a show called “Show Me America,” it was surprisingly difficult to fill the role. “A friend of ours knew this young woman who was a hysterical person,” Bahruth said. “And her name was Teri Garr. Yep, Teri Garr got her start as the Statue of Liberty at Disney World.”
Of course, she had been in many bit parts in film and TV before that: She has a cameo in the Monkees’ film “Headquarters,” and had a prominent speaking part in the original “Star Trek” episode “Assignment: Earth,” playing a frazzled denizen of the 20th century crossing paths with the Enterprise crew hailing from the more enlightened future. And she was practically a background dancer go-to for a whole slew of Elvis movies, where she did not receive a credit: “Fun in Acapulco,” “Kissin’ Cousins” (that time as a “Hillbilly dancer”!), “Viva Las Vegas,” “Girl Happy,” “Clambake.”
Garr’s part as Inga, the assistant to Gene Wilder’s Dr. Frederick Frankenstein in “Young Frankenstein” was an unquestionable breakout. She ultimately marries the mad scientist following a tryst on top of his reanimation table, and finds that he’s an even better lover after he’s transferred his Monster’s brain into himself. He must be, because she immediately breaks into song with “Ah, Sweet Mystery of Life” with full Nelson Eddy/Jeanette Macdonald passion.
More serious roles followed: She’s left to hold down the fort when her husband Richard Dreyfuss abandons his family at the end of “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” to go live among the aliens that had been visiting earth. She’s the concerned mother of taciturn Kelly Reno, who’s been rescued after spending months alone on a desert island with nothing but an Arabian horse for companionship, in “The Black Stallion.” She got to express her musical chops as one of the leads of Francis Ford Coppola’s “One from the Heart.”
But a role like that of Sandy in “Tootsie” showed what Garr was really capable of, and the Academy took notice, giving her an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress. As funny, if not more so, than co-stars Dustin Hoffman and Bill Murray, she plays a frustrated young actress as incredibly high strung and vulnerable and a little too self-conscious to fully inhabit the parts she’s reading for. She’s going up for the role of a southern hospital administrator, and it’s only when she’s truly enraged at her almost-boyfriend Hoffman that she’s really able to get into character. But of course, donning drag, Hoffman’s character gets the part instead. As Sandy, Garr brought a kind of manic 21st century energy years in advance — the kind of flustered, scattered neuroticism that’s so come to define our own era, but that was very singular in 1982. Teri Garr, ahead of her time.
