The ‘Young Frankenstein’ and ‘Tootsie’ Star was 79

Teri Garr, the comedic actress and singer who brought her vivacious personality to “Young Frankenstein” and earned an Oscar nomination for “Tootsie,” died Tuesday in Los Angeles after a long battle with multiple sclerosis. She was 79.

An influential performer for comedians including Tina Fey, Garr was a familiar face in dozens of TV shows and movies from the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s. The actress revealed in 2002 that she had been diagnosed with MS and suffered an aneurysm in 2006.

After starting her career as a dancer, Garr first gained attention as Inga, the sassy assistant in Mel Brooks’ 1974 “Young Frankenstein,” who greeted Gene Wilder’s Dr. Frederick Frankenstein with the memorable “Would you like to have a roll in ze hay”. ?”

On “Friends” she played Phoebe Abbot for three episodes in 1997 and 1998.

In Steven Spielberg’s “Close Encounters of the Third Kind”, Garr was the wife of Richard Dreyfuss’ character. She earned a supporting Oscar nomination starring opposite Dustin Hoffman as his actor friend in Sydney Pollack’s “Tootsie,” and played the working mom to Michael Keaton’s stay-at-home dad in “Mr. Mom.”

Born in Ohio, she moved to Los Angeles, graduated from North Hollywood High School and attended Cal State Northridge before moving to New York to study acting. Beginning as a go-go dancer, she can be seen shimmying behind the performers in the filmed rock concert “The TAMI Show” and in six Elvis Presley features, most choreographed by her mentor David Winters. During the 1960s, she had bit roles in sitcoms including “That Girl,” “Batman” and “The Andy Griffith Show.”

Garr’s first speaking role came in the Monkees’ offbeat feature film “Head,” written by Jack Nicholson, whom she had met in an acting class. In the “Assignment Earth” episode of “Star Trek,” she played a badass secretary, the first of many such roles.

She became a regular singer and dancer on “The Sonny and Cher Show” before landing a role in Francis Ford Coppola’s “The Conversation.”

Coppola cast her again in “One From the Heart”. Among her other roles were the wife of John Denver’s character in “Oh, God,” the mother of the boy protagonist in “The Black Stallion,” and roles in “Dumb and Dumber” and “Mom and Dad Save the World.”

Garr worked with many of the era’s most notable directors: in addition to Brooks, Spielberg, Pollack and Coppola, she worked with Martin Scorsese on “After Hours” and Robert Altman on “The Player” and “Pret-a-Porter.” Her many television roles included stints on “M*A*S*H,” “The Odd Couple” and “The Bob Newhart Show.”

Garr explained to The AV club in a brutally honest and feminist interview from 2008, why she was often cast as the “long-suffering wife” in movies like “Mr. Mom”: “If there’s ever a woman who’s smart, funny or witty, people are afraid of that, so they don’t write that. They only write parts for women where they let everything steam over them, where they let people wipe their feet on them. That’s the kind of parts I play, and the kind of parts that are for me in this world. In this life.”

Despite her obvious appeal to big-time directors, she found many of her encounters in the industry excruciatingly sexist, such as being told by “The Sonny and Cher Show” producers that if she wanted to be paid as much as the men, could she leave. “The whole world is sexist, starting with that show. That was an example of that: not getting paid what everyone else was getting paid to do the same thing. So I started learning early on that women are steamrolled,” she told AV Club.

She hosted “Saturday Night Live” three times and appeared frequently on “The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson” and “Late Night With David Letterman.”

Her career waned in the late 1990s, although she continued to take on small roles in films including “Dick” and “Unaccompanied Minors” and as the voice of Mary McGinnis in two Batman animated films, “Batman Beyond: The Movie” and “Batman Beyond: Return of the Joker.”

She published an autobiography, “Speedbumps: Flooring It Through Hollywood,” in 2006.

She is survived by her daughter, Molly O’Neil, and grandson Tyryn.