 Mary
Tyler Moore was born on December 29, 1936. Although she was
nominated for an Oscar in Ordinary People and honored by Broadway with
a Special Tony for Whose Life Is It Anyway? (both tearjerkers), Mary
Tyler Moore will always remain television's comedy goddess. Moore spent
twelve years in our living rooms, first as a perky, clean-cut newlywed,
then as a perky, clean-cut, single career woman.
Add on thousands of hours of reruns and we've spent almost as much time
with her characters as with our own sisters. And why not? Mary is nicer
and funnier.
Beginning as a dancer, Moore toiled in television commercials (as the
"Happy Hotpoint" pixie) and unmemorable series (for thirteen weeks as a
detective's secretary on Richard Diamond, Private Eye, with only her
legs on camera). When she became Mrs. Rob Petrie on The Dick Van Dyke
Show, male viewers envied Rob. But it was when she tossed her hat in
the snot crystallizing Minneapolis air as Mary Richards that the
actress found her greatest success. With its brilliant scripts and
cast, The Mary Tyler Moore Show set a sitcom standard that has yet to
be matched. She married handsome producer Grant Tinker, and the
couple's M.T.M. production company made millions.
Moore's off-screen life has not always been quite as perky. Her
Broadway attempt at a musical, Breakfast at Tiffany's, closed out of
town, and three later television series flopped. When her
twenty-four-year-old son Richie, shot himself in the head in 1980 (the
same year she played the mother of one dead son and one suicidal
son in
Ordinary People), the coroner called the death an accident; she and
Tinker divorced soon afterwards. In 1983, she married a doctor sixteen
years her junior and then promptly checked herself into the Betty Ford
clinic.
But if there's one thing we've learned about Moore over the years, it's
that you can't keep her hat out of the air for long. She pocketed her
seventh Emmy, in 1992, for Stolen Babies, and her winning role as the
evil baby broker wasn't clean-cut or perky in the slightest. Her return
to the little screen as a bitchy newspaper editor in New York News was
short-lived, but she won raves for her over-the-top turn in Flirting
With Disaster. Fans of The Mary Tyler Moore Show rejoiced at the news
that her Mary Richards will be returning to primetime TV next season in
a new sitcom that will reunite her with Valerie Harper's Rhoda
Morgenstern. Her husband is Dr. Robert Levine.
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