Teri Garr dies at 79: What was the cause of death of the ‘Young Frankenstein’ actress?

Actress Teri Garr, who appeared in classic movies such as Young Frankenstein, Close Encounters Of The Third Kind and who gained an Oscar nomination for her role as Sandy Lester in the 1982 rom-com Tootsie, passed away at her Los Angeles home on Tuesday. She was 79.

Garr died due to complications from multiple sclerosis (MS), her publicist Heidi Schaeffer told MassLive. The veteran actress had spent over two decades battling the autoimmune disease, which she was first diagnosed with in 1999 following several years of symptoms. She made it publicly known in October 2002 and spent a number of weeks in a coma after suffering a brain aneurysm in December 2006. She became an ambassador for MS, raising awareness of the condition.

Terry Ann Garr was born on 11 December 1944 in Ohio. Both of her parents were involved in show business - her father Eddie was a vaudeville performer and her mother Phyllis was a dancer. The family relocated to Los Angeles when Teri and her two older brothers were still young. It was in LA that her father died after suffering a heart attack, when Garr was just 11 years old.

Dance classes and first acting roles

It was also in LA that she discovered a passion for dance. The punishing ballet classes would serve her at the start of her career when she landed several roles as a dancer, appearing alongside Elvis in Viva Las Vegas and several other of his mid-60s films. But it was acting that she was keen to explore. She was given a walk-on role in The Monkees trippy, psychedelic freakout Head and her first big break came the following year, playing a secretary in an episode of Star Trek.

A handful of film roles followed but the one that really turned her into a household name was the Mel Brooks-directed Young Frankenstein, in which she played Inga, assistant to Dr. Frederick Frankenstein (Gene Wilder) who resumes his grandfather’s work of re-animating corpses.

In 1977, she was cast as Ronnie Neary, the long suffering wife of electric utility lineman Roy, in the epic science fiction drama Close Encounters Of The Third Kind. The Neary’s lives change forever when Roy witnesses a UFO and eventually joins the extraterrestrials on board the mothership as it sets off for another galaxy.

The other movie that Garr is probably best known for is Tootsie. She starred opposite Dustin Hoffman, a perfectionist actor who is struggling to find work so adopts a female persona in order to get hired. Tootsie was nominated for 10 Academy awards, including one for Garr as Best Supporting Actress, which ended up going to her co-star Jessica Lange.

In total, Garr, who New Yorker critic Pauline Kael described as “the funniest neurotic dizzy dame on the screen” racked up 159 film credits according to the Imdb database. She released her autobiography Speedbumps: Flooring It Through Hollywood in 2006, in which she touched on her experiences of Hollywood, family life and her health issues with typical, self-deprecating, deadpan humor. .

Garr was married to John O’Neil from 1993 until their divorce in 1996. She is survived by her adopted daughter, Molly O’Neil and grandson, Tyryn.