Posted on 08/30/2019 4:44:13 PM PDT by EdnaMode
Valerie Harper, the Emmy-winning sitcom star whose role as the somewhat neurotic “Rhoda Morgenstern” made her one of television’s biggest and most beloved stars in the 1970s, died today. She was 80 and had been suffering from various cancers for a number of years. She had been in a coma for a while before succumbing today, her family told KABC-TV entertainment reporter George Pennacchio.
The veteran TV and stage actress was best known for playing sidekick Rhoda Morgenstern on The Mary Tyler Moore Show, then taking the character into her own popular spinoff, Rhoda.
She also starred in the 1980s sitcom, Valerie, which – thanks to some head-butting over creative control with the show producers – saw Harper’s character killed off as an explanation for her exiting the show. It then morphed into Valerie’s Family, and was later re-titled The Hogan Family.
“”I like a lot of preparation,” she said in a 2009 interview with the Televisin Academy Foundation (watch a snippet below). “Necause when you get to the moment, you can just forget your lines, you’re not thinking, ‘what’s my line?’ you’re feeling what the character is, and only that line can come out.”
Harper also had recurring roles on The Office and The Simpsons. Her film credits include Freebie and the Bean (1974) and Chapter Two (1979).
Over the years, she won multiple Emmy Awards for her work on Rhoda and The Mary Tyler Moore Show, and was nominated for a Tony in 2010 for her role as Tallulah Bankhead in the play Looped.
Harper was diagnosed with lung cancer in 2009. Then, in 2013, doctors discovered she’d developed a rare brain cancer. But she defied the odds on both dread diseases and even participated in the TV show Dancing With The Stars in 2014.
More recently, she took a turn for the worse, and Harper’s husband, Tony Cacciotti, started a GoFundMe campaign titled The Valerie Harper Cancer Support Fund on July 8 to help with the mounting medical bills. He said in the request that she required 24/7 care, but that he did not want to put her into hospice care.
Harper was born on Aug. 22, 1939 in Suffern, New York, the middle child of three. The family moved frequently, owing to her father’s work as a lighting salesman, and Harper lived in New Jersey, California, Michigan, Oregon and then New Jersey again. She briefly attended a Jersey City high school, then traveled across the river and graduated from the Young Professionals School on West 56th Street in Manhattan, where her classmates included future stars Sal Mineo, Tuesday Weld and Carol Lynley.
The young Harper studied ballet, and began her career as a Broadway dancer in the musical Take Me Along in 1959. She appeared in several other plays, then scored a bit part in the 1959 film Li’l Abner. From there, she segued into a mixed bag of a show business career – television episodes, small theater work, touring with the Second City comedy troupe, recording comedy records, and even dabbling in some television writing.
Her big break came in 1970, when a casting agent spied her and asked her to audition for the role of Rhoda Morgenstern on the Mary Tyler Moore Show. Harper, who was raised in the Catholic faith, instantly transformed into Mary’s slightly neurotic, quintessentially Jewish sidekick. She played the role from 1970-1974. Her character then moved to New York for her own spin-off, Rhoda, and stayed from 1974-1978.
Harper won four Emmy Awards and a Golden Globe for her work as Rhoda. She was also nominated for a Golden Globe for “New Star of the Year” for her role in the film Freebie and The Bean.
Harper ran for SAG president in 2001, but lost to Melissa Gilbert before the union merged with AFTRA.
Survivors include her husband, Tony Cacciotti, and daughter Cristina Harper. No memorial plans have been announced.
Here is an hourlong portiion of her sit-down for The Interviews from the TV Academy Foundation:
Did you ever watch “Thoroughly Modern Millie”? MTM was really beautiful in it.
Yes she could dance
They had her dance a lot in early DVD shows
Kinda beat dress
Bongos
Capris
Black sweater
Keds
She was not at all Jewish, but forever beloved.
Hard to believe she was 80. Time flies, I guess. RIP.
Ah yes, Thalia Menninger.
“...And Cloris Leachman is still around and kicking, my, my....”
So is Keith Richards.
Yes Thalia would not go out with Dobie because she was a mean rotten person and didn’t want to hurt Gillis. Another was she couldn’t go out with him because she had to marry a rich man to take care of her family.
She always had some ridiculous excuse which no one believed.
Georgia Engel (Georgette) died earlier this year.
I was always struck by Rhoda’s apartment with all the walls painted bright red.
RIP Valerie Harper.
She brought a lot of happiness and is fondly remembered.
While she’s not in this ABC promo from 1979, many of her contemporaries are and it’s rather shocking to realize how many are gone, and how many before their time. While Valerie’s last years were hard she fought hard as long as she could, may she RIP.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tO96_Ypjqik&t=19s
I think she leaves Marilyn Monroe in the dust.
Good movie.
Jack Soo was probably embarrassed though.
“I don’t know why I’m putting this in my mouth. I should just apply it directly to my hips.”
I remembered this line in particular over the years, because it represented the humor that worked in the MTM show and the generation of shows it spawned.
I thought Valerie Harper and Cloris Leachman, and Betty White all showed what a sitcom could really be, funny. You would add Ted Knight and Ed Asner to that ensemble, and Georgia Engels, and of course MTM herself, but it is now a reality of the past.
Sitcoms just aren’t that well written, acted, or as funny as they were then.
She is certainly easy to look at.
I had never heard of her until post-6.
Thank you for posting that. When TV was funny and decent. Soap and Barney Miller are still a few of my favorites.
She was sweet. Thanks Valerie.
I just knew his name was going to be mentioned in this thread.
Georgia Engel was also in one of my favourite short lived shows, 1983’s “Jennifer Slept Here”. She played the mother of the John Navin Jr character (who could see and interact with the ghost of Jennifer Farrell played by Ann Jillian but no one else could).
“Hi, this is Carlton, your doorman.”
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