Teri Garr death: Young Frankenstein and Friends star dies at 79

Teri Garr, the beloved comic actor known for her performances in Young Frankenstein, Friends and Tootsie, has died. She was 79.

The Ohio-born actor died on Tuesday, October 29 from multiple sclerosis. A statement from her publicist, Heidi Schaeffer, confirmed the news and said she was “surrounded by family and friends.” Garr had faced multiple health problems in recent years, including undergoing an operation in January 2007 to repair an aneurysm.

Among the many paying tribute on social media was Bridesmaids director Paul Feig, who called her “truly one of my comedy heroes. I couldn’t have loved her more.”

Garr seemed destined for show business from an early age.

Her father was Eddie Garr, a well-known vaudeville comedian; her mother was Phyllis Lind, one of the original high-kicking Rockettes at New York’s Radio City Music Hall. Their daughter began dance lessons at 6 and by 14 was dancing with the San Francisco and Los Angeles ballet companies.

She was 16 when she joined the road company of West Side Story in Los Angeles, and as early as 1963 she began appearing in bit parts in films.

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From there, the blonde, statuesque Garr found steady work dancing in movies, and she appeared in the chorus of nine Elvis Presley films, including Viva Las Vegas, Roustabout and Clambake.

Her big film break came as Gene Hackman’s girlfriend in 1974’s Francis Ford Coppola thriller The Conversation. That led to an interview with Mel Brooks, who said he would hire her for the role of Gene Wilder’s German lab assistant in 1974’s Young Frankenstein — if she could speak with a German accent.

“Cher had this German woman, Renata, making wigs, so I got the accent from her,” Garr once recalled.

The film established her as a talented comedy performer, with New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael proclaiming her “the funniest neurotic dizzy dame on the screen.”

In Tootsie, she played the girlfriend who loses Dustin Hoffman to Jessica Lange and learns that he has dressed up as a woman to revive his career. (She also lost the supporting actress Oscar at that year’s Academy Awards to Lange.)

Although best known for comedy, Garr showed in such films as Close Encounters of the Third Kind, The Black Stallion and The Escape Artist that she could handle drama equally well.

“I would like to play ‘Norma Rae’ and ‘Sophie’s Choice,’ but I never got the chance,” she once said, adding she had become typecast as a comic actor.

In 1983, Garr began to feel “a little beeping or ticking” in her right leg. It eventually spread to her right arm as well, but she felt she could live with it. By 1999 the symptoms had become so severe that she consulted a doctor. The diagnosis: multiple sclerosis.

For three years Garr didn’t reveal her illness.

“I was afraid that I wouldn’t get work,” she explained in a 2003 interview. “People hear MS and think, ‘Oh, my God, the person has two days to live.’”

After going public, she became a spokeswoman for the National Multiple Sclerosis Society, making humorous speeches to gatherings in the U.S. and Canada.

“You have to find your center and roll with the punches because that’s a hard thing to do: to have people pity you,” she commented in 2005. “Just trying to explain to people that I’m OK is tiresome.”

She also continued to act, appearing on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, Greetings From Tucson, Life With Bonnie and other TV shows. She also had a brief recurring role on Friends in the 1990s as the mother of Lisa Kudrow’s Phoebe.

Garr married contractor John O’Neill in 1993. They adopted a daughter, Molly, before divorcing in 1996.

Additional reporting by Associated Press.