Mary Tyler Moore, R.I.P.

Actress Mary Tyler Moore has died in a Connecticut hospital at the age of 80. She had been out of the limelight in recent years due to diabetes.


After cutting her teeth as a dancer, Moore started getting roles in TV shows such as Richard Diamond: Private Detective, Johnny Staccato (starring John Cassavettes), Overland Trail and Wanted: Dead or Alive.


Moore would attain stardom in 1961 when she was cast by Carl Reiner as Laura Petrie in The Dick Van Dyke Show for which she would win an Emmy. But her greatest success came during the 1970's after forming a production company with her husband Grant Tinker. You know it as MTM Enterprises (complete with meowing cat). MTM Enterprises first and greatest production was the eponymous Mary Tyler Moore Show in which she was cast as single career woman Mary Richards. Not only it is arguably the greatest TV comedy show of the 1970's, but arguably the best TV comedy ever even 40 years after it went off the air.


Over the next two decades, Moore returned to TV with four different series none of which lasted beyond a season. Her most successful acting venture post-Mary Tyler Moore Show was when in 1980 Robert Redford cast her against type as an unsympathetic grieving mother in Ordinary People for which she garnered her only Oscar nomination.


The best tribute I can think of would be to play the funeral scene from "Chuckles Bites The Dust" where Mary Richards makes us both laugh and cry at the same time. Then again Mary Tyler Moore could always turn the world on with her smile. R.I.P.