R.I.P.: Actress Teri Garr, Oscar Nominee For "Tootsie"

Teri Garr (1945-2024)

Teri Garr, the alternately shy and sassy blond actress whose little-girl voice, deadpan comic timing, expressive eyes and cinematic bravery in the face of seemingly crazy male characters made her a star of 1970s and ’80s movies and earned her an Oscar nomination for her role in “Tootsie,” died on Tuesday at her home in Los Angeles. She was 79.

Her publicist, Heidi Schaeffer, said the cause was complications of multiple sclerosis, according to The NY Times.

Garr received that diagnosis in 1999, after 16 years of symptoms and medical research, and made her condition public in 2002. In late 2006, she had a ruptured brain aneurysm and was in a coma for a week, but she was eventually able to regain the ability to walk and talk.

Onscreen, Ms. Garr’s outstanding features were her eyes, which could seem simultaneously pained, baffled, sympathetic, vulnerable, intrigued and determined, whether she was registering a grand new discovery or holding back tears. If her best-known roles had a common thread, it was the erratic behavior of the men in her characters’ lives.

In “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” she initially went into denial when her husband (Richard Dreyfuss) became obsessed with U.F.O.s, but promptly abandoned him, taking the children, when he built a mountain of garbage, fencing and backyard soil in their family room. 

With John Denver

In “Oh, God!,” she was supportive when her husband (John Denver), a California supermarket manager, told everyone he was hanging out with God incarnate (George Burns). In “Tootsie,” for which she earned a 1983 Academy Award nomination for best supporting actress, she whined eloquently as the neglected friend-turned-lover of an actor (Dustin Hoffman) who was behaving strangely. It turned out he had been posing as a woman to get better acting jobs.

Throughout the years, Garr had a recognizable television presence as a favorite talk-show guest of both Johnny Carson and David Letterman and a three-time host of “Saturday Night Live.”