Valerie Harper, the actress who became one of the most beloved figures in American television history, died on August 30, 2019, in Los Angeles at the age of 80. Her death came more than six years after doctors told her husband that metastatic cancer involving the membranes around her brain and spinal cord had left her only three to six months to live. Born Valerie Katherine Harper on August 22, 1939, in Suffern, New York, she began serious dance training as a teenager. At around age 16, she was hired into the corps de ballet at Radio City Music Hall, where she sometimes performed as many as five shows a day.
She later danced in Broadway musicals including Li’l Abner and Wildcat, and studied improvisation through Second City, training that would define her comic style. In 1970, Harper was cast as Rhoda Morganstern, the sharp-witted, self-deprecating best friend and upstairs neighbor on The Mary Tyler Moore Show. The role was originally intended as a sharper, more abrasive foil to Mary, but Harper’s warmth transformed the character. Mary Tyler Moore herself encouraged the change, and Harper went on to win three consecutive Emmy Awards for supporting actress between 1971 and 1973.
Rhoda proved so popular that CBS gave her a spin-off, simply titled Rhoda, which premiered in September 1974. On October 28, 1974, an estimated 52 million Americans watched the episode in which Rhoda got married, one of the highest-rated single broadcasts in American television history at the time. Harper won a fourth Emmy for the role, this time as lead actress, in 1975. Her first marriage, to actor Richard Schaal, ended in divorce in 1978.
She later met Tony Cacciotti, an actor, producer, and fitness professional, while preparing for the film Chapter Two in the late 1970s. The couple lived together for several years, adopted a daughter named Christina in 1983, and married in 1987. Their marriage lasted 32 years. In 1986, Harper returned to series television in a show that carried her first name.
Valerie cast her as the mother of a suburban family. The following year, a contract dispute with Lorimar, the studio behind the series, ended with Harper being fired. The show was renamed, first Valerie’s Family and later The Hogan Family, and her character was written out as having died in a car accident. Harper fought back through the courts.
After a three-week trial in Los Angeles in 1988, a jury concluded that she had been wrongfully fired, awarding her roughly $1. 4 million in damages, plus an additional $200,000 tied to a television movie in her original agreement. Cacciotti, who had worked on the series as a producer and was also dismissed, received about $220,000. Harper called the verdict vindication.
Her career continued through the 1990s and 2000s with television guest roles, films, and a return to the stage. In 2009, at age 70, she was diagnosed with early-stage lung cancer, underwent surgery to remove a lobe of her lung, and recovered. She had never smoked, though her mother, also a non-smoker, had died of the same disease. In 2010, Harper earned a Tony Award nomination for her performance in the Broadway play Looped, in which she portrayed the flamboyant actress Tallulah Bankhead.
The role demanded she remain on stage for nearly the entire play, delivering long, demanding speeches. She was 70 years old. While preparing for a national tour of Looped in early 2013, Harper noticed disturbing symptoms. Lines she performed regularly suddenly would not come, her speech became slurred, and she felt a strange numbness in her jaw.
She was hospitalized, and tests led to a diagnosis of leptomeningeal carcinomatosis, an inoperable metastatic recurrence of her earlier lung cancer involving the fluid and membranes around the brain and spinal cord. Doctors spoke first to her husband, Tony. They told him the disease was usually measured in months, estimating three to six months. Cacciotti initially could not bring himself to tell his wife the full diagnosis.
Harper later recalled that he hid the news because he was so bereft. Their adult daughter, Christina, helped tell her what the doctors believed. The diagnosis became public in early March 2013. In interviews, Harper admitted her fear and described low moments, but she refused to surrender the time she had.
The phrase she used, often repeated in the years that followed, was: “Do not go to the funeral before the day of the funeral. While you are living, live. ”
She did not die in three months, or six. Treatment slowed the disease, and scans improved.
In autumn 2013, at age 74, she competed on ABC’s Dancing with the Stars, dancing with professional Tristan MacManus for four weeks before being eliminated in tenth place. Her presence on the live ballroom stage, four months after her diagnosis became public, drew an emotional response from audiences. She continued to work in guest television roles and short films, and she spoke publicly about cancer, early detection, and the emotional reality of living with a terminal diagnosis. She was careful not to claim her attitude had cured her.
She described her survival as evidence that medical averages are not personal calendars. By 2019, her health had declined significantly. She required round-the-clock care, and an online fundraising campaign was established with her husband’s support to help with medical costs. Cacciotti also made a public statement acknowledging that doctors had recommended hospice care, but he said he could not bring himself to move her into it and intended to keep her comfortable at home.
Harper turned 80 on August 22, 2019. She died eight days later. She was buried at Hollywood Forever Cemetery in Los Angeles on September 7, 2019, at a service attended by family, friends, and colleagues. Her daughter Christina spoke at the funeral.
Tributes remembered her as one of television’s most recognizable and warmly loved performers, a woman whose presence in living rooms for decades felt like the company of an old friend. Her legacy includes four Emmy Awards, a Tony nomination, a landmark legal victory against a major studio, and a public response to terminal illness that became part of her final chapter. She refused, until the end, to treat a prognosis as an appointment with death.
As she often said, while she was living, she intended to live.