Actress Teri Garr always retained her signature smile and a gleam in her camera-ready bright eyes throughout a full career of stage, television and film, even during a 25-year struggle with multiple sclerosis.
I interviewed Teri a few times in the past two decades, and she was always candid, filled with stories and remained optimistic about her own health concerns.
Teri died at age 79, just six weeks before what would have been her 80th birthday on Dec. 11. Her publicist Heidi Schaeffer told the Associated Press that Teri was surrounded by family and friends at her home in Los Angeles when she passed. She battled other health problems in recent years, including an operation in January 2007 to repair an aneurysm.
According to her AP obituary, she was born and raised in Lakewood, Ohio, and her father Eddie Garr was a well-known vaudeville comedian, and her mother Phyllis Lind was one of the original high-kicking Rockettes at New York’s Radio City Music Hall. Having taken dance lessons since age 6, by her early 20s, Teri and her mother had made their way to Los Angeles after the death of Teri’s father, and she found steady work hired by the film studios as a backup singer and dancer in nine of Elvis Presley’s movies, including “Viva Las Vegas,” “Roustabout” and “Clambake.”
She was also cast in smaller roles on numerous television shows, including “Star Trek,” “Dr. Kildare,” “The Monkees,” “Batman” and “Shindig,” before her agent got her a higher profile opportunity to use her stellar comedic timing as a regular cast member on “The Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour” playing a reoccurring silly character Olivia as a friend to Cher in comedy sketches as well as a second female foil to Sonny.
Producer and director Mel Brooks recognized Teri’s comedy potential and cast her as Gene Wilder’s German lab assistant in the 1974 comedy feature film smash hit “Young Frankenstein.”
“I came up with my thick German accent by basing it on a gal I knew named Renata, who was Cher’s wig lady,” Teri told me in a previous interview.
Teri continued with starring roles in feature films like “Close Encounters” opposite Richard Dreyfuss and “Oh, God!” with George Burns and John Denver, both in 1977, “The Black Stallion” opposite Mickey Rooney in 1979, “Tootsie” opposite Dustin Hoffman and “Mr. Mom” opposite Michael Keaton, both in 1983. She was also a favorite 1990s couch guest on late-night talk shows, always amusing audiences with stories and quips to counter hosts like Johnny Carson, Jay Leno and David Letterman.
By the time I was out of college and working in entertainment journalism, my interview encounters with Teri came a quarter of a century ago in the early 2000s after she bravely decided to reveal her multiple sclerosis diagnosis.
In July 2003, Teri was the keynote speaker at a luncheon held at Strongbow Inn, sponsored by the National MS Society and Women Against Multiple Sclerosis. I attended with my mom Peggy, and we were seated near Teri at the head table. The event was hosted by Nancy Adams, who owned Strongbow Inn with husband Russ, and like Teri, Nancy also has MS.
“I like people such as Nancy who want to spread a message of hope rather than those who insist on sharing stories of doom and gloom,” Teri, then 53, told me when we talked in 2003.
“I was once at this party, and a friend of mine I haven’t seen in a while is asking me how I’m doing. I tell her fine. And then she starts on and on about Richard Pryor, saying: ‘Have you seen him lately? He’s in a wheelchair now. So I nod and acknowledge I’m aware that Pryor, who also has MS, has been having recent struggles with the condition, but I don’t need to hear any more details. But my friend persists and says: ‘You know Teri, he can’t really even talk anymore.’ This isn’t information I need to be reminded of from a friend or anyone.”
Pryor died at age 65 in December 2005. Singer and actress Annette Funicello, another famous face of MS, died at age 70 in 2013.
“When I look around me and the world issues that are out there, me having MS is really small potatoes in the grand scheme,” Teri said to me in 2003.
“I’m working to change how others look at people with this awful disease.”
The first time she realized her health concerns was in 1983.
“I was always big into jogging, and I was living in New York at the time,” she said.
“I began having problems with stumbling and tripping over my own feet. I thought I was just being clumsy but decided to check it out.”
Teri, whose only brother is a physician in Southern California, saw specialists who believed the problem to be something minor involving a pinched nerve. After a short time, the problem seemed to correct itself, and Garr put the entire episode behind her.
However, what Teri was experiencing was the earliest undetected signs of MS, which was relatively new in the world of medical research breakthroughs. The disease, which can be difficult to detect and control since it reveals itself in mounting intervals and spurts, had gone into remission, giving Teri little reason to further investigate her earlier medical advice.
By 1993, the disease re-emerged and in full force. This time around, doctors made an on-target diagnosis.
“MS is a slippery slope,” Teri said.
“There is so much we still don’t know about this disease and what lies ahead down the road. Even among doctors, there’s no blanket opinions.”
Teri, who was divorced and lived with her beloved only daughter Molly, said some of the worst effects of her disease were fatigue, poor memory and weak cognitive skills at times, as well as a “drop foot” condition that required her to wear a brace before eventually the need for a wheelchair.
She told me that “an even worse part of dealing with the disease was the false opinions of others,” especially the group she called “the Hollywood set.”
“There’s always lots of rumors and whispering, and that’s one of the reasons my phone stopped ringing for work,” said Teri, who was grateful when we last chatted because she was cast as the mother of Lisa Kudrow’s character Phoebe on NBC’s popular sitcom “Friends,” which ended its run in 2004.
“I don’t know what’s worse in Hollywood, being handicapped or being a woman over age 50. I’ve never thought of myself as a victim and never will,” she said.
Philip Potempa is a journalist, published author and the director of marketing at Theatre at the Center. He can be reached at pmpotempa@comhs.org.
