Mary Tyler Moore

Mary Tyler Moore (born December 29, 1936) is an American actress, primarily known for her roles in television sitcoms. Moore is perhaps best known for her role in the CBS-TV hit sitcom show The Mary Tyler Moore Show (1970–77), in which she starred as Mary Richards, a 30-something single woman who worked as a local news producer in Minneapolis, and for her earlier role as Laura Petrie on CBS-TV's (Dick Van Dyke's wife) on The Dick Van Dyke Show (1961–66). She also appeared in a number of films, most notably 1980's Ordinary People, in which she played a role that was the polar opposite of the television characters she had portrayed, and for which she was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actress. Moore has also been active in charity work and various political causes, particularly around the issues of Animal rights and Diabetes mellitus type 1. Mary has had a number of health problems over the years, having struggled with diabetes, starting in the late 1960s and alcoholism, which was treated in the 1980s. In May 2011, Moore underwent elective brain surgery to remove a benign meningioma.

Mary Tyler Moore Early life and Career

Mary was born in the Brooklyn Heights section of Brooklyn, New York, to a family of Irish and English descent, to George Tyler Moore, a clerk, and his wife Marjorie Hackett. Her father George was a Roman Catholic and her mother a Catholic convert. Mary was the eldest of three siblings. Her maternal grandparents were immigrants from England. Her paternal great-grandfather, Lieutenant Colonel Lewis Tilghman Moore, owned the house which is now Stonewall Jackson's Headquarters Museum. Moore's family moved to Los Angeles, when she was eight years old. She attended Saint Rose of Lima, a Catholic school in Brooklyn, followed by St. Ambrose School (Los Angeles) and the Immaculate Heart High School (Los Feliz).

At the age of 17, a young Mary aspired to be a dancer. She started her career as "Happy Hotpoint", a tiny elf dancing on Hotpoint appliances in TV commercials during the 1950s series Ozzie and Harriet. She filmed 39 TV commercials in five days, ultimately earning about $6,000 from her first job.[8] Her time as "Happy Hotpoint" ended when it became difficult to conceal her pregnancy in the dancing elf costume. Moore modeled anonymously on the covers of a number of record albums and auditioned for the role of the older daughter of Danny Thomas for his long-running TV show, but was turned down. Much later, Thomas explained that "no daughter of mine could have that [little] nose."

Television works

Moore's first regular television role was as a mysterious and glamorous telephone receptionist on Richard Diamond, Private Detective. To add to the mystique, only her voice was heard and her shapely legs appeared on camera. About this time, she guest-starred on John Cassavetes's NBC detective series Johnny Staccato. In 1960, she guest starred in two episodes, "The O'Mara's Ladies" and "All The O'Mara's Horses", of the William Bendix-Doug McClure NBC western series, Overland Trail. Several months later, she appeared in the first episode, entitled "One Blonde Too Many", of NBC one-season The Tab Hunter Show, a sitcom starring the former teen idol as a bachelor cartoonist. In 1961, Moore appeared in several big parts in movies and on television, including Bourbon Street Beat, 77 Sunset Strip, Surfside Six, Wanted: Dead or Alive, Steve Canyon, Hawaiian Eye, and Lock-Up.

In 1961, actor/drector Carl Reiner cast her in The Dick Van Dyke Show, an acclaimed weekly series based on Reiner's own life and career as a writer for Sid Caesar's television variety show, which he origianally wrote as a possible vechile for himself, titled The Alan Brady Show. The lead character which he played, Alan Brady, would later be incorporated in the series as a recurring character for whose variety show the Rob Petrie character would serve as a comedy sketch writer for.

The show was produced by Danny Thomas's company, and Thomas himself recommended her. He remembered Mary as "the girl with three names" whom he had turned down earlier. Moore's energetic comic performances as Van Dyke's character's wife, begun at age 24 (eleven years Van Dyke's junior), made both the actress and her signature tight capri pants extremely popular, and she became internationally famous. When she won an Emmy award for her portrayal of Laura Petrie, she said, "I know this will never happen again." Mary Tyler Moore recently stated on The Rachel Ray Show that she was actually 23 years old when she first starred on the Dick Van Dyke Show. She had told producers that she was 24 because she heard that initially Dick Van Dyke had stated that she might be too young for the part.

In 1970, after having appeared earlier in a pivotal one-hour musical special called Dick Van Dyke and the Other Woman, Moore and husband Grant successfully pitched a sitcom centered on Moore to CBS. The Mary Tyler Moore Show, was a half-hour newsroom sitcom featuring Ed Asner as her gruff boss Lou Grant, a character that would later be spun off into an hour-long dramatic series. The premise of the single working woman's life, alternating during the program between work and home, became a television staple. After six years of ratings in the top 20, the show slipped to number #39 during its seventh season. Producers argued for its cancellation because of its falling ratings, afraid that the show's legacy might be damaged if it were renewed for another season. To the surprise of the entire cast including Mary Tyler Moore herself, it was announced that they would soon be filming their final episode. After the announcement, the series finished strongly and the final show was the most watched show during the week it aired. The 1977 season would go on to win an Emmy Award for Outstanding Comedy Series, to add to the awards it had won in 1975 and 1976. The series had become a touchpoint of the Women's Movement because it was one of the first to show, in a serious way, an independent working woman. After a brief respite, Moore threw herself into a completely different genre. She attempted two unsuccessful series in a row: Mary, which featured David Letterman, Michael Keaton, Swoosie Kurtz and Dick Shawn in the supporting cast and lasted three episodes, which was re-tooled as The Mary Tyler Moore Hour, a backstage show within a show, with Mary portraying a TV star putting on a variety show. To arouse curiosity and nostalgic feelings, Dick Van Dyke appeared as her guest, but the program was canceled within three months. About this time, she also made a one-off musical/variety special for CBS, titled Mary's Incredible Dream, which featured John Ritter, among others. It did poorly in the ratings and, according to Moore, was never repeated and will likely never be aired again because of legal problems surrounding the show.

In the 1985–86 season, she returned to CBS in a series titled Mary, which suffered from poor reviews, sagging ratings, and internal strife within the production crew. According to Moore, she asked CBS to pull the show, as she was unhappy with the direction of the program and the producers. She also starred in the short-lived Annie McGuire in 1988.

By the mid-1990s, Mary had a cameo and a guest starring role as herself on two episodes of the hit ABC-TV series Ellen. She subsequently also guest starred on Ellen DeGeneres's next TV show, The Ellen Show, in 2001. In 2004, Moore reunited with her Dick Van Dyke Show castmates for a reunion "episode" called The Dick Van Dyke Show Revisited.

In August 2005, Moore guest-starred as Christine St. George, a high-strung host of a fictional TV show on three episodes of Fox sitcom That '70s Show. Moore's scenes were shot on the same soundstage where The Mary Tyler Moore Show was filmed in the 1970s. Moore made a guest appearance on the season 2 premiere of Hot in Cleveland, which stars her old co-star Betty White. This will mark the first time since 1977 that White and Moore have worked together since The Mary Tyler Moore Show.

FIlm and LIterary works

Moore was also nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress for 1980's Ordinary People. Other feature film credits include Just Between Friends and Flirting with Disaster.

Mary has appeared in a number of television movies, including Like Mother, Like Son, Run a Crooked Mile, Heartsounds, The Gin Game (based on the Broadway play; reuniting her with Dick Van Dyke), Mary and Rhoda, Finnegan Begin Again, and Stolen Babies for which she won an Emmy Award in 1993. Mary has written two memoirs. The first, After All, released in 1995, in which she acknowledged that she is a recovering alcoholic. The next, Growing Up Again: Life, Loves, and Oh Yeah, Diabetes, was released on April 1, 2009, and focuses on living with type 1 diabetes (St. Martin's Press; ISBN 10: 0312376316).

Mary Tyler Moore Personal and Family life

In 1955, at age 18, she married Richard Carlton Meeker, whom Mary described as "the boy next door," and within six weeks was pregnant with her only child, Richard Jr. (born July 3, 1956). Coincidentally, he was known as "Richie," which was also the name of her TV son on The Dick Van Dyke Show. Meeker and Moore divorced in 1961. She later married Grant Tinker, an NBC executive, in 1962, and in 1970 they formed the television production company MTM Enterprises, which created and produced the company's first television series, The Mary Tyler Moore Show. Moore and Tinker divorced in 1981. She married Dr. Robert Levine on November 23, 1983 at the Pierre Hotel in New York City. They met when her mother was treated by him in New York on a weekend housecall after returning from a visit to the Vatican. In 1980, at the age of 24 Mary's son Richie died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound, accidentally shooting himself in the head while handling a sawed-off shotgun. The gun was later taken off the market because of its "hair trigger". Just prior to his death, Moore had secured a job for him in the CBS mailroom.