Teri Garr built a career on physical precision, so when her own legs began to betray her in the early 1980s, she spent nearly two decades searching for answers. By the time she publicly revealed her multiple sclerosis diagnosis on national television in October 2002, Hollywood had already started to write her off. She called the industry’s quiet sidelining of her “the actress protection program. ”
Born Terri Ann Garr on December 11, 1944, she came from a show business family.
Her mother, Phyllis, had been one of the original Rockettes before working in studio costume departments, and her father, Eddie, was a vaudeville comic who died of a heart attack in 1956 when Garr was 11. Her father had warned his children to stay out of the business, calling it humiliating, a warning Garr spent her life disregarding. She started dance lessons at six and was working with ballet companies in San Francisco and Los Angeles by 14. At 16, she was initially cut from an audition for the road company of West Side Story but returned the next morning in different clothes and won a spot.
That production gave her a single speaking line, and the audience’s reaction convinced her she wanted to be in front rather than in the chorus. The early 1960s brought commercial work, beach party movies, and dance appearances on shows like Shindig and Hullabaloo. She appeared in no fewer than nine Elvis Presley films, though in blink-and-miss-it roles. Years later, she dryly recalled on Fresh Air that Presley’s approach at the time was to put out at least four bad films a year.
She was just a body in a frame, she said, and it ate at her. Her pivot to acting came through classes in Los Angeles that included a pre-stardom Jack Nicholson, who gave her a small speaking role in the Monkees’ film Head. She also landed a visible TV part in 1968 as secretary Roberta Lincoln in the Star Trek episode “Assignment Earth. ” Her first real film break arrived in 1974 with The Conversation, opposite Gene Hackman.
That same year, Mel Brooks cast her as Inga in Young Frankenstein, but only after she returned with a German accent she had borrowed from a hairstylist she knew. Her mother was already working wardrobe on the same picture. Young Frankenstein became an instant classic, and critic Pauline Kael later called Garr the funniest neurotic dizzy dame on the screen. Through the rest of the 1970s, major directors lined up for her.
Steven Spielberg cast her as Richard Dreyfuss’s wife in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. She worked with Carl Reiner on Oh, God! , Carroll Ballard on The Black Stallion, and Francis Ford Coppola on One from the Heart in 1982. That last project was meant to liberate Coppola from the studio system but instead bankrupted his Zoetrope company and went out of print for years.
Her most famous role came in 1982’s Tootsie. She initially thought the part of Sandy, the friend whose audition Dustin Hoffman’s character steals, was a second-banana role. Director Sydney Pollack and writer Elaine May convinced her otherwise. Garr even helped rewrite the film’s climactic confrontation, turning Sandy’s conventional female despair into a precise piece of comic rage that The Washington Post called her greatest movie scene.
Off camera, she later described Hoffman pinching her backside between takes to break her concentration. She told Terry Gross on Fresh Air in 2005 that she loved working with him, then added that she would yell at him to stop fooling around. She noted that co-star Jessica Lange did not appreciate the same treatment. Hoffman, after her death, called her brilliant and singular and said there was no one like her.
On April 11, 1983, Garr was nominated for Best Supporting Actress for Tootsie. She lost that night to her own co-star, Jessica Lange. The years that followed were busy but fraying underneath. She starred opposite Michael Keaton in Mr.
Mom in 1983, in Firstborn in 1984, and in Martin Scorsese’s After Hours in 1985. She earned an Emmy nomination for the 1987 TV adaptation of Pack of Lies. She hosted Saturday Night Live three times and visited The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson more than 40 times. It was around 1982 or 1983 that the first symptoms appeared.
She later told Brain & Life that she began tripping while jogging in Central Park in New York and felt a small buzzing or ticking in her right leg. The symptoms came and went, and she ignored them. During this same stretch, she became a fixture on David Letterman’s late-night show, where their chemistry produced one of the most memorable comedy double acts in television. Their banter was a running argument: he teased her about her mother, she insulted his hairline, and he once described their dynamic as a perpetual first date that never advanced or ended.
In 1985, while promoting After Hours, Letterman persuaded her to take a shower in the office bathroom during the live broadcast. She resisted at first, then let herself be talked into it. From inside the shower, she yelled that she hated him and demanded to know why she was doing this. Letterman later apologized on air, conceding the bit had been, on reflection, kind of a sexist thing to do.
In the early 1990s, she was the subject of gossip about a possible relationship with Letterman. She never confirmed it, and he never denied it. Their on-camera flirtation was strong enough that viewers assumed it had to be real. In July 1990, a Los Angeles County judge issued a restraining order against a woman who had been harassing Garr for five years.
The court ordered the woman to stay at least 100 yards from Garr’s home and to stay away from her workplace for three years. In March 1988, Garr was arrested for trespassing during an anti-nuclear demonstration at the Nevada Test Site alongside Daniel Ellsberg, Robert Blake, Kris Kristofferson, and Martin Sheen. The arrest left no real mark on her career. She married building contractor John O’Neil on November 11, 1993, the same day the couple welcomed their adopted daughter, Molly.
The marriage lasted three years, and she filed for divorce in 1996 citing irreconcilable differences. She never married again, and Molly became the central figure in her interior life. By the late 1990s, the neurological symptoms had become impossible to wave away. She went to 11 doctors, who either misread the symptoms, dismissed them, or sent her elsewhere.
In 1999, she finally received a diagnosis of multiple sclerosis, but she did not announce it. She did not tell agents or most of her friends. She lived inside the secret for three years while the jobs quietly disappeared and Hollywood began to hear the rumor before the medical confirmation did. She kept working in flashes.
She played Phoebe Abbott, the long-lost biological mother of Lisa Kudrow’s character, on Friends in 1997 and 1998. She turned up on ER, Felicity, Sabrina the Teenage Witch, King of the Hill, and Batman Beyond. Kudrow later called her a comedic acting genius and a huge influence on her own work. On October 8, 2002, she went on Larry King Live and told the world about her MS.
When King asked gently whether she considered herself disabled, she replied with a perfect deadpan: “Being over 50 in Hollywood was already disabled. ”
In December 2006, a second blow came. She was at home when a brain aneurysm ruptured. Her daughter Molly, then 13, found her unconscious and called 911.
Surgeons drilled into her skull, threaded a coil into the vessel, and stopped the bleed. Garr spent a week in a coma and months in rehabilitation, having to relearn to walk, talk, and think. She returned to public view in June 2008 on Letterman’s CBS show to promote the independent film Expired. In 2011, she retired from acting as her movement became increasingly limited.
Teri Garr died on October 29, 2024, in Los Angeles of complications from multiple sclerosis. She was 79. Her publicist, Heidi Schafer, said she was surrounded by family and friends.
She leaves behind a body of work that transcended the ditzy blonde roles she was often handed, and a private battle fought with the same discipline she once brought to the dance floor.