Mary Tyler Moore

Before the two shows that made her, she was a jobbing television actress: bit parts through the late 1950s and early 1960s on Hawaiian Eye, The Deputy, Bourbon Street Beat and Checkmate, plus an uncredited appearance on The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet. Nothing on that list predicts what came next.

As Laura Petrie on The Dick Van Dyke Show from 1961 to 1966 she played a sitcom wife who got jokes rather than reactions, which was close to a structural innovation at the time. Then The Mary Tyler Moore Show ran from 1970 to 1977 and put a single working woman at the centre of a comedy without treating her as a problem the show had to solve. Both series are usually credited with helping define a new picture of American womanhood, a heavy thing to say about the half-hour comedy form and true anyway.

She won seven Primetime Emmy Awards, three Golden Globes and two Tony Awards, and she produced as well as performed. The best of the later work is the work that turned her warmth against her: Beth Jarrett in Ordinary People is a mother who cannot reach for her own son, and the performance is chilling precisely because the audience arrived expecting Mary Richards. Thoroughly Modern Millie, Flirting with Disaster and guest runs on That '70s Show and Hot in Cleveland fill out a career that ran until her death in 2017.