MOORE, Mary Tyler

(b. 29 December 1936 in New York City), multiple-award-winning actress who created two of the most memorable characters in comedic television history: the beloved housewife Laura Petrie on The Dick Van Dyke Show (1961–1966) and the spunky single career woman Mary Richards on The Mary Tyler Moore Show (1970–1977).

Moore was the oldest of three children of George Moore, a utilities company auditor, and Marjorie Hackett, a homemaker who suffered from alcoholism, a disease that plagued all her children. The family moved to Los Angeles when Moore was eight; she attended Catholic school in California, graduating in 1955 from Immaculate Heart High School. At eighteen Moore married a neighbor, a twenty-seven-year-old food salesman, Richard (Dick) Meeker, and quickly became pregnant with her son. By then, she had begun making forays into show business, appearing as a dancing elf in commercials for Hotpoint appliances. She landed her first television series role in 1959, playing Sam the switchboard operator on Richard Diamond, Private Eye. Only her legs were shown on-screen, and Moore quit after three months.

Her big break came in 1961 with the television series built around the appealing Everyman comedian Dick Van Dyke. Audiences immediately responded to the casting of the pert, sensitive Moore opposite Van Dyke, finding strong chemistry between the two as they portrayed a loving husband and wife—albeit a couple forced by the strict TV standards of the day to sleep in twin beds. The show was innovative in many respects. Up until then, situation comedies had focused almost exclusively on domestic life, but The Dick Van Dyke Show spent as much time at the lead character's workplace, where he was a writer for a variety show. The series creator and supporting actor Carl Reiner drew on his own real-life experiences as a writer for The Sid Caesar Show and in the process cast a revealing behind-the-scenes light on the magic of show business.

While Moore's character, Laura Petrie, was in most respects a traditional suburban housewife, she did break one television barrier: she was the first homemaker to wear pants on-screen. Most comedies featured perfectly attired women in dresses and pearls, which they wore even while vacuuming, but Moore insisted that pants were more realistic. Her Capri-pants-and-flats look became a fashion benchmark. Moore first demonstrated her comic potential in an early episode entitled "Blond-Haired Brunette," in which a botched dye job leaves her half-blond. She explains the disaster to Van Dyke through sobs, rolled eyes, and gulping speech as the audience roars with laughter. After that, she was no longer confined to the role of "straight man" to Van Dyke's antics. Other memorable episodes featured her sliding down a pile of walnuts in a dream sequence and gamely enduring as her toe remains stuck in a bathtub faucet for an entire show.

As Moore shaped her character, she looked to her two role models, Lucille Ball and Katharine Hepburn. Ball owned the studio where the show was filmed and dropped by the set occasionally. She often laughed at funny moments during filming—the ultimate compliment to Moore and the rest of the cast. A high point for Moore came when Ball one day stopped her to say, "You're very good." The series brought Moore lead-actress Emmy Awards in 1964 and 1966 and a Golden Globe Award in 1965.

In 1961 Moore divorced her husband after six years of marriage. Two years later she married the television executive Grant Tinker—a relationship that later assured her the chance to take on her most groundbreaking television role. First, however, Moore tried her hand at feature films. She found that she was upstaged by Julie Andrews and Carol Channing in 1967's Thoroughly Modern Millie and then tepidly received in several other movie roles, including her 1969 portrayal of a nun opposite Elvis Presley in the critically panned Change of Habit. Her personal life was also rocky: she suffered a miscarriage in 1966 and then was diagnosed with diabetes, a disease that eventually led her to become a spokeswoman for the Juvenile Diabetes Foundation.

Finally, Moore favorably caught the attention of audiences and television executives in a 1969 television variety show that reunited her with Dick Van Dyke. The Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) gave the green light to the development of a new television series built around Moore; she and her husband co-founded the production company MTM Enterprises to work on the project, with Moore as chairwoman. The development of the new show reflected the emerging women's liberation movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Women were increasingly pursuing careers instead of stay-at-home marriages, as they demanded more political and social rights along with sexual freedom. The television series That Girl starring Marlo Thomas (1966–1971) had paved the way for a show about a single career woman. In 1970 Moore became Mary Richards, a producer climbing the ranks at a Minneapolis television news station, in The Mary Tyler Moore Show.

The show's development ran afoul of CBS executives when they learned that Richards was to play a divorcee. Fearing that audiences would associate the divorce with the popular Van Dyke, executives insisted that she instead simply be on the rebound from a serious relationship. Unlike That Girl, there was no steady boyfriend in the lead character's life; The Mary Tyler Moore Show became increasingly bold in suggesting that Richards had an active sex life. Distinguished by its insightful writing and memorable supporting characters, the series ran for seven seasons and won twenty-nine Emmys. Moore herself was nominated in the lead-actress category every year and won in 1973, 1974, and 1976.

Moore's career never again hit the same comedic stride. For several years she enjoyed a growing reputation as a skilled dramatic actress, winning praise with her portrayal of a paralyzed sculptor in the Broadway play Whose Life Is It, Anyway? in 1980. Also in 1980 she was nominated for an Academy Award for her portrayal of a cold mother in the film Ordinary People, a role for which she won a Golden Globe Award. Despite her success as an actress, Moore was entering the most trying period in her life. Her only son died in 1980 from a self-shooting that was ruled accidental, and she divorced Tinker in 1981. In 1983 she married her third husband, Robert Levine, a cardiologist eighteen years her junior. The following year Moore checked herself into the Betty Ford Clinic for treatment for alcoholism. The disease already had claimed the life of her younger sister, who died of an alcohol-and-drug overdose in 1978; her brother died of cancer in 1991 while in recovery from alcoholism.

Moore's attempts to return to series television flopped in quickly canceled shows during the 1980s and 1990s. She was named to the Television Hall of Fame in 1985. During the 1990s she made varyingly successful television movie appearances; her portrayal of an illegal adoption trafficker in Stolen Babies (1993) won her another Emmy Award. Even as the twentieth century ended, the enduring legacy of the Mary Richards role continued with television retrospectives, specials, and even a commemorative statue built in downtown Minneapolis depicting the famous Mary Tyler Moore Show opening: Moore tossing her hat into the air to celebrate "making it after all."

In The Complete Directory to Prime Time TV Stars, Moore was equated with Lucille Ball and Carol Burnett and dubbed "one of the great comediennes of American television." People magazine, naming Moore one of its top twenty-five stars in 1989, put it another way: "More than any other TV performer, Mary used charm to win us: She became America's sweetheart."

Moore's autobiography, After All, was published in 1995. A biography is Jason Ponderoff, Mary Tyler Moore (1986). She was profiled in the New York Times Magazine (26 Nov. 1995).

Leigh Dyer