Oscar-nominated actor Teri Garr dead at 79
Teri Garr, the Oscar-nominated actor best known for roles in Young Frankenstein and Tootsie, has passed away aged 79.
The celebrated actor died on October 29th in Los Angeles following a decades-long battle with multiple sclerosis. Over the last two decades since Garr received an official diagnosis, she spoke openly about her health issues, including the severe aneurysm she suffered in 2006.
Garr’s career took off in 1974 when she starred in the Mel Brooks movie, Young Frankenstein, which helped her becoming a leading name in Hollywood. Furthermore, Garr appeared in Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind. However, her most notable role was alongside Dustin Hoffman in Sydney Pollack’s Tootsie, which landed her an Academy Award nomination in the ‘Best Supporting Actress’ category.
Other achievements in her glittering career included hosting Saturday Night Live on three separate occasions. Although Garr was a less prominent face in Hollywood in the 1990s, she did appear in three episodes of Friends towards the end of the decade as Phoebe Abbot.
In the 1970s, Garr starred in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation opposite Gene Hackman which proved to be the start of a strong relationship that was rekindled on Coppola’s One From the Heart.
Teri Garr’s battle with multiple sclerosis
“It started in 1983. I was living in New York and I’d go jogging in Central Park, and I’d start tripping,” she told Brain and Life magazine about the first time she realised an issue with her health.
Garr continued: “I’d notice that the more I ran and got my body heated up, the weaker I’d get. But then it’d go away, and it went away for about ten years. And then it started up again, and I started getting stabbing pains in my arm when I ran. But I figured hey, I’m in Central Park, maybe I am being stabbed.”
Despite these recurring issues, Garr continued to act prolifically, and multiple sclerosis was frequently raised by many medics over the years, she explained, “Every movie I did, I’d go see a different doctor in the location where we were shooting, and every one had a different opinion about what it might be. Every so often someone would mention MS, but then someone else would think it was something else.”
Garr was officially diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 1999, but kept it a secret for three years until she appeared on Larry King Live to reveal the news to the nation.
After sharing her medical issues on Larry King Live, Garr’s work in Hollywood began to dry up. Throughout the 2000s, Garr appeared more sporadically in projects which were also of less stature than earlier in her career, and she officially retired in 2011.
While Garr did contribute her MS diagnosis to her retirement from the silver screen, she also claimed to Brain and Life that another factor was the lack of roles for older women in Hollywood, stating, “I think my career would have changed anyway at a certain age, but Hollywood’s very finicky about everyone being perfect. When things slowed down, it was either the MS or that I’m a stinking actress, so I chose to believe it’s the MS.”
However, despite no longer practicing her craft, Garr believed it was vital that she continued to speak about the reality of MS, remarking, “There’s definitely fear and misunderstanding out there about what MS is, and that’s one of the reasons why it’s so important to me to go out and talk about it.”
Garr is survived by her daughter, Molly O’Neal.
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