Teri Garr, Gone But Not Forgotten

Growing up in the 1980s and 1990s, it seemed Teri Garr was in just about every other movie that was popular. She started out acting in 1963 mostly as a background dancer in musicals when she was a teenager. But mainstream success didn’t happen until a decade later when she was cast by Francis Ford Coppola in The Conversation in 1974.

That same year, she was in one of the best comedies ever made, Young Frankenstein, where she played Inga, the laboratory assistant to the titular character. To be cast among comics like Gene Wilder, Marty Feldman and Madeline Kahn and still hold your own is a testament to a good actor. Inga was young, bubbly and sexy. Yet, Garr understood the role and made it work, It’s rare nowadays to see a comedy where the entire cast works together rather than works against each other always trying to have the last laugh of each scene. It shows how talented Mel Brooks is as a filmmaker as he said Garr’s “German” accent had them in stitches during auditions.

Garr made Inga a hilarious performance with her fake German accent. She based it on the wigmaker for Cher on The Sonny and Cher Show. Brooks is right. There is something funny as she asks Frederick Frankenstein (Wilder) if he wants to “have a roll in ze hay.” And as Frankenstein looks over at Igor (Feldman), Inga begins to rolls around in the hay in the back of the carriage. Or during one of the movie’s most memorable scenes, Frankenstein and Inga are messing with a secret door that can be opened by moving a candle. And when Inga finds herself on the other side, she bluntly orders, “Put. Ze candle. Back!”

The roles brought her to the forefront mainstream where she had bigger roles in movies like Oh God! and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. However, I think everyone can agree her character in Close Encounters is poorly written as Richard Dreyfus’ nagging wife, but it was probably because Steven Spielberg felt it would make the audience sympathize more with the madness Dreyfus’ character undergoes.

Still in a matter of five years, she had worked with Brooks, Coppola and Spielberg and many big name actors. She ended the 1970s with a role in The Black Stallion. By the start of a new decade, she was cast as one of the leads in Coppola’s very ambitious musical One from the Heart. The 1981 movie is notorious for only grossing about half a million of its huge $26 million budget and get mixed reviews from critics.

Garr would also appear in The Sting II, one of the worst (and probably most forgettable) sequels ever made. However, in between these two bad movies, she appeared in another comedy classic, Tootsie. Garr played a struggling actress name Sandy Lester who finds herself unknowingly losing a role on a daytime drama (not a soap opera!) to her friend and acting teacher, Michael Dorsey (Dustin Hoffman), who dresses up like a woman calling himself Dorothy Michaels.

Garr earned an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress losing to her co-star Jessica Lange. However, Tootsie, similar to Young Frankenstein, is one of those movies where it’s hard to single one or a few roles out. With an ensemble that includes Charles Durning, Bill Murray, Geena Davis, Dabney Coleman, George Gaynes and Sydney Pollack (who also directed and co-produced), it’s timeless comedy that still works as each actor feeds off each other in every scene.

You have to kind of feel sorry for Sandy because she’s treated badly being stuck in a bathroom at a party for over half an hour and then taking some food with her pretending she already ate. Sandy’s relationship with Michael turns more closer leading to her being unintentionally ghosted by him as he tries to woo Lange’s more successful Julie Nichols. When Michael finally reveals his ruse live, Sandy goes from angrily hate-watching the show to letting out a scream that she can’t believe all this has happened. Film critic Pauline Kael called Garr “the funniest neurotic dizzy dame on the screen.”

Sadly, it was on the set of Tootsie, Garr would first notice symptoms of multiple sclerosis which she would later be diagnosed with. The ailment would have effects on her acting that she mostly was doing voice-over work and small roles in movies and TV shows during the 2000s.

Other film roles would include Mr. Mom, alongside Michael Keaton and the recently deceased Martin Mull, as she plays a housewife who goes back into the workforce when Keaton’s character is laid off. While the movie feels kind of dated by today’s standards, Garr has some great scenes mainly when by habit she cuts the meat on the plate of Mull’s character.

“She was a wonderful woman,” Keaton said about his co-star and friend. “Not just great to work with but great to be around.”

Another role in an ensemble would be the terrific dark comedy After Hours, directed by Martin Scorsese. Garr plays Julie, a depressed waitress at a dive bar with an old-fashioned hair style from the late 1950s/early 1960s in the SoHo neighborhood of New York City. She’s one of the strange people Griffin Dunne’s Paul Hackett comes across that he tries to get to help him but she has some strange quirks that get on his nerves.

Other film roles in the 1980s and 1990s would include reuniting with Dreyfus in Let It Ride and Coleman in Short Time. She was one of the many celebrities who agreed to do a cameo as themselves in Robert Altman’s 1992 Hollywood satire The Player. She would go on to appear in his 1994 movie, Pret-a-Porter. That same year she had a supporting role as Helen Swanson, stepmother to Mary Swanson (Lauren Holly) in Dumb and Dumber.

On TV, she found a role as an abused wife who gets back at her husband played by Bruce McGill on a 1991 episode of Tales From the Crypt. It was the first of one two TV episodes directed by Michael J. Fox who also appears. The following year, she played another abused wife, this time of a politician played by George Hamilton, who has an affair with Martin Tupper (Brian Benben), the main protagonist of the series Dream On.

Even if Garr’s health wasn’t becoming a problem, by the time she appeared in Dumb and Dumber, she had turned 50. There was a new batch of younger actresses with exceptional beauty and great comic timing. Julia Roberts, Sandra Bullock, Jennifer Aniston and many others would carry the torch. Casting her as Phoebe Abbott, the estranged mother of Phoebe Buffay (Lisa Kudrow) on Friends, as well as Ursula Buffay in Mad About You, was lightning in a bottle. It wasn’t that they were both blondes but they both gave off that same comic energy.

Kudrow said she was very lucky and grateful to have worked with Garr calling her “a comedic acting genius who was and is a huge influence on me and I know I’m not alone in that.”

By the 2000s as she had publicly confirmed the MS diagnosis, there was Jenna Fischer and Tina Fey who were inspired by her. In the 2000s,  she became a National Ambassador for the National Multiple Sclerosis Society and National Chair for the Society’s Women Against MS program (WAMS). In 2006, she published her memoir, Speedbumps, Flooring it Through Hollywood, but she suffered a brain aneurysm that put her in a coma for a week. She had to regain the abilities for speech and motor skills.

Her final two film roles in Expired and Kabluey premiered during the summer of 2008 and her last TV role was How to Marry a Billionaire in 2011. With over 150 acting credits on TV and in the movies, she only received an award through the National Board of Review for Best Acting Ensemble for Pret-a-Porter. But for many actors, it’s not the awards but for the experience.

She danced with Elvis Presley and shared the screen with George Burns. And she was one of many celebrities making cameos in Ray Parker Jr.’s “Ghostbusters” music video.

What is your favorite role or movie of hers? Please comment.