Teri Garr
Teri Garr is an actor, born 1944.
She danced before she spoke. Raised in North Hollywood by a comic actor and a studio costumer, trained in ballet, Garr spent the early sixties uncredited in the background of films, including a run of Elvis Presley musicals where the credit reads Dancer or Carnival Dancer or Hillbilly Dancer. She studied at the Lee Strasberg Institute in New York, and always named a Star Trek episode, Assignment: Earth, as the job after which real acting work started.
The breakthrough year was 1974, twice: a supporting role in Coppola's The Conversation, then Inga in Young Frankenstein. What she turned out to be extraordinary at is a role most comedies throw away. The standard description of her career is accurate: she often played women coping with the life-changing experiences of their husbands, children or boyfriends. That is the thankless part, the one written to react. Garr made it the funniest thing in the film by playing the woman's frustration as entirely reasonable, so the joke lands on the man having the adventure. Ronnie Neary in Close Encounters is the same performance played straight and it is quietly devastating: her husband is having a transcendent experience and she is the one holding a household together while he builds a mountain in the living room.
Tootsie is where the industry finally noticed, bringing Academy Award and BAFTA nominations for Sandy Lester, a struggling actress who loses a soap role to her friend and acting coach. It is the definitive version of her instrument: comic, humiliated, and never pitiable.
She kept working through the eighties and nineties in Mr Mom, After Hours, Dumb and Dumber and Dick, and voiced Mary McGinnis across the Batman Beyond series. She died in 2024.
Movies (39)
- Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977)
- Dumb and Dumber (1994)
- Young Frankenstein (1974)
- After Hours (1985)
- The Conversation (1974)
- Michael (1996)
- Summertree (1971)
- Tootsie (1982)
- Prêt-à-Porter (1994)
- Batman Beyond: Return of the Joker (2000)
- Casper Meets Wendy (1998)
- Mr. Mom (1983)
- Dick (1999)
- Aloha Scooby-Doo! (2005)
- The Black Stallion (1979)
- A Simple Wish (1997)
- The Sting II (1983)
- Head (1968)
- Kabluey (2007)
- Short Time (1990)
- Let It Ride (1989)
- Batman Beyond: The Movie (1999)
- One from the Heart (1982)
- Kissin' Cousins (1964)
- Viva Las Vegas (1964)
- Searching for Debra Winger (2002)
- Oh, God! (1977)
- The Black Stallion Returns (1983)
- Red Line 7000 (1965)
- Roustabout (1964)
TV (13)
- The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson (1962)
- Batman Beyond (1999)
- The Bob Newhart Show (1972)
- McCloud (1970)
- It Takes a Thief (1968)
- The New Dick Van Dyke Show (1971)
- Life with Bonnie (2002)
- Adventures in Wonderland (1992)
- Good Advice (1993)
- Shindig! (1964)
- Women of the House (1995)
- The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour (1971)
- Fresno (1986)
Books (1)
Where to start with Teri Garr
Tootsie is the performance to see first, because it is the one where the character's exasperation is the subject rather than the garnish, and Garr plays it without asking to be liked.
Then take the pair that show the same instrument tuned two different ways: Young Frankenstein for the broad comedy, where she is doing precise farce inside a film of enormous silliness, and Close Encounters of the Third Kind for the version with no jokes in it at all. Ronnie Neary is one of the great unfashionable performances of seventies American cinema, and the film gives her almost nothing to work with.
After that, Mr. Mom and After Hours are the eighties peak, The Conversation the serious early credit, and One from the Heart the strange Coppola experiment worth a look. Dumb and Dumber is the late paycheque, and she is still funnier in it than the material deserves.