Teri Garr’s Singular Charm

Garr, who passed away on Tuesday at the age of seventy-nine, was the daughter of a vaudevillian and a former Radio City Rockette. She had trained hard as a ballet dancer when she joined a Los Angeles production of West Side Story right out of high school. Television commercials followed, along with several gigs as a backup dancer—often appearing alongside her good friend, the choreographer Toni Basil—in such mid-1960s entertainments as the legendary concert movie T.A.M.I. Show (1964), featuring Marvin Gaye, the Beach Boys, and the Rolling Stones; the Annette Funicello vehicle Pajama Party (1964); and a good handful of Elvis Presley movies, including Viva Las Vegas (1964).

During this period, Garr was also appearing in small roles on popular television series, such as Batman, That Girl, and Star Trek, and she was a regular on The Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour. She was studying acting, too, and one of her classmates, Jack Nicholson, was working with Bob Rafelson on a screenplay for what would become the Monkees’ anarchic kiss-off to the entertainment industry. Nicholson handed out tiny roles to everyone in the class, and Garr appears in Head (1968) as a damsel bitten by a snake: “Quick! Suck it before the venom reaches my heart.”

After Garr’s father died when she was eleven, her mother took up work as a seamstress and worked her way into the costume departments of several Hollywood productions. When she mentioned to her daughter that she would be working on Mel Brooks’s followup to his comedy smash Blazing Saddles (1974), Garr was determined to get herself cast. Brooks and Wilder had written a hilarious but loving homage to James Whale’s 1931 Frankenstein, and Garr auditioned for the role of Elizabeth, Frederick’s socialite fiancée.

Brooks wanted Madeline Kahn, who turned him down, and when Garr was called back a third time, she learned that Kahn had changed her mind and accepted after all. But perhaps Garr could come back the next day with a German accent? “Ja, I zertainly can.”

Brooks and his cast had a famously fabulous time making Young Frankenstein, and on Tuesday, Brooks tweeted that Garr’s “‘German’ accent had us all in stitches!” When Frederick surmises that the monster he’s creating and will eventually cherish like a son will require larger-than-usual body parts, it dawns on Garr’s Inga that he “vould have an enormous Schwanzstucker!”

Francis Ford Coppola gave Garr a sweet scene opposite Gene Hackman in The Conversation (1974) and then cast her as one of four leads in One from the Heart (1982), a production that Garr remembered as “long and tedious and hard.” Between those two films, Garr played the worried wife of Richard Dreyfuss’s Roy Neary in Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) and the worried wife of John Denver’s Jerry Landers in Carl Reiner’s Oh, God! (1977). “If her best-known roles had a common thread,” writes Anita Gates in the New York Times, “it was the erratic behavior of the men in her characters’ lives.”

Most would consider the behavior of Dustin Hoffman’s Micheal Dorsey in Sydney Pollack’s Tootsie (1982) erratic—at best. Michael is an irrepressible but unemployed actor who disguises himself as a woman in order to nab the role his close friend—Garr’s Sandy Lester—is auditioning for. In an impromptu attempt to cover up what he’s done, he sleeps with her. And then dumps her. “Sandy is a potential sad sack,” writes Michael Koresky, “but Garr imbues her with such thrilling vivacity and no-nonsense pathos that she becomes anything but. To these eyes, she’s MVP in a supporting cast that’s all potential MVPs.”

Garr and Michael Keaton hit it off playing an advertising exec and a stay-at-home dad in Mr. Mom (1983), a comedy directed by Stan Dragoti and written by John Hughes. Martin Scorsese’s After Hours (1985) was met with terrific reviews, but it took years for audiences to catch up with it. Griffin Dunne’s Paul Hackett, a yuppie-ish uptown office worker, unwittingly plunges into a harrowing odyssey through SoHo and takes momentary refuge in a stranger’s apartment.

Garr’s Julie is a bar waitress delighted to have Paul’s company until one of his stray comments hits her the wrong way and she cuts loose and “babbles about people who mock her and think she isn’t smart,” as Esther Zuckerman puts it in the NYT. “It’s a little terrifying to Paul, and to us. Still, there’s an ultimate sadness about Julie, a lonely creature of the night who has tried to make her apartment a retro pink paradise with a rainbow on the cupboard, but who is ultimately consumed by her isolation. She is perhaps not the brightest bulb, but Garr realizes that the knowledge of that is destroying her.”

By this point, Garr had hosted Saturday Night Live three times and made countless memorable appearances on Johnny Carson’s and David Letterman’s late-night talk-shows. As she segued further into television, she won over a new generation of fans when she appeared in three episodes of Friends as the biological mother of Lisa Kudrow’s Phoebe. “One of the many things I loved about Teri Garr,” tweeted Vulture television critic Jen Chaney on Tuesday, “is that she could play frazzled, even ditzy, characters, but she never, ever made them seem dumb. She couldn’t. She radiated intelligence and didn’t know how to turn it off, and the women she played reaped the benefits.”

In the late 1990s, symptoms suggesting multiple sclerosis began to become more pronounced, and in 2002, the diagnosis was confirmed. “MS is a sneaky disease,” she wrote in her 2005 memoir, Speedbumps: Flooring It Through Hollywood. “Like some of my boyfriends, it has a tendency to show up at the most awkward times and then to disappear entirely.” But she also wrote that “I really do count my blessings. At least I used to. Now I get so tired I have a woman come once a week and count them for me.”