TERI Garr, who passed away earlier this week at the age of 79, was an actress with an impressive array of cult credits to her name.
A comedy icon with a screen-filling effervescence, she began her showbiz career as a background dancer in Elvis movies. Those willing to look closely enough can see her throw some serious Go-Go moves through a total of five cheap and cheerful King outings in the 60s.
Her television credits ranged from popping up regularly in small screen shows as varied as Star Trek and Dr Kildare in her earliest days, to a brief spell as Phoebe Abbot on Friends in the late-90s.
She got her first big screen break in Francis Ford Coppola’s supremely paranoid 1974 thriller The Conversation, and went on to grace all manner of productions both big and small, adding her magic to movies both mainstream and more selective of audience alike.
That means we got to see her play the wife of Richard Dreyfuss’s central character in Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters Of The Third Kind and as friend to Dustin Hoffman’s lead character in Sydney Pollack’s brilliant Tootsie, for which she bagged a Best Supporting Actress Oscar nomination.
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Teri Garr added her magic to movies both mainstream and more selective of audience alike.
Thankfully, Garr’s wide-ranging list of screen credits also included some less box office friendly appearances that ensured she retained her cult credentials throughout her career.
She’s brilliant as the mum to Michael Keaton’s stay at home dad in Mr Mom, for example. She played feisty mother figures better than most down the years, and fans of The Monkees will always remember her performance in their frankly insane but utterly fabulous psychedelic career suicide note that was Head in 1968. It was her first speaking part on screen, in a film that was penned by Jack Nicholson, whom she’d met at a Hollywood acting class.
It’s telling that Garr worked with some of the finest directors of post-war cinema in the likes of Coppola, Pollack and Spielberg, but it’s a film that she made with the great Mel Brooks that truly stands out as a showcase for her comic on-screen abilities in all their glory.
Young Frankenstein hit cinema screens in 1974, and with one relatively small supporting role as a German lab assistant to Gene Wilder’s Dr Frederick Frankenstein, her legacy as a comic legend was assured. A richly layered love letter to the old Universal horror films of the 1930s, Brooks delivered one of the greatest ever cinema spoofs.
As Inga, the flirtatious side-kick with the ridiculous cod European accent, the Ohio-born actress provided one of the biggest comic characters in a movie positively creaking with them. When she greets Frankenstein with that unforgettable line “Vould you like to have a roll in ze hay?”, a classic comedy moment is nailed forever.
The final two decades of her life may have been dominated by her battle with MS and other health issues, but those laughs that Teri Garr gave us down the decades will ring on forever.
