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Actress Teri Garr, best known for her roles in Young Frankenstein and Tootsie, has died at the age of 79.
Garr died of multiple sclerosis "surrounded by family and friends" on Tuesday (October 29), her publicist, Heidi Shaeffer, confirmed to the Associated Press. The actress reportedly dealt with other health problems in recent years, which included undergoing surgery to repair an aneurysm in January 2007.
“I think everybody is scared and frightened when they hear something like that,” Garr said during a 2022 interview with CNN in which she first revealed her multiple sclerosis diagnosis. “That’s because there’s so much – you know, there’s not a lot of information out there about it. And a lot of people don’t know that it’s not that bad. I mean, I’m going on with my life.”
Garr began her acting career with the road company of West Side Story in Los Angeles in 1963 at the age of 16 and later appeared in the chorus of nine Elvis Presley films including Viva Las Vegas, Roustabout and Clambake. The actress' big break came as Gene Hackman's girlfriend in the Francis Ford Coppoloa film The Conversation in 1974, which led to an interview with Young Frankenstein director Mel Brooks, who told Garr he would cast her as Gene Wilder's German lab assistant if she was capable of speaking in an accent, which she said was inspired by Cher's wig-maker.
Garr went on to roles in the films Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Tootsie and Mr. Mom and later appeared in three episodes of Friends as Phoebe Buffay's birth mother Phoebe Abbott Sr.