After attending acting schools in Los Angeles and New York, Teri Garr spent most of her early on-screen days as a background dancer doing the groovy, go-go style moves that all the hip kids were up to in those far-out days.

Literally following in the footsteps of her mother, who had been a Rockette, Garr ended up in at least six of Elvis's string of sing-and-dance movies, including Fun in Acapulco (1963), Kissin' Cousins (where Garr was credited as "Hillbilly Dancer"), Roustabout, Girl Happy, Clambake, and Viva Las Vegas (1964).

It's a lot of fun to pick Teri Garr out from the crowd of dancers in those colorful movies, where you can see Garr's personality already shining from her style and enthusiasm. One imagines Elvis asking casting directors to make sure she's in each movie, and she seems to be more prominent from one film to the next.

Garr was also in Pajama Party (as "Pajama Girl") alongside Mickey Mouse Club favorite Annette Funicello, and can be found in many of that wild era's movies, shows, and dance programs where the ability to exude personality while dancing was essential. Look for her in The T.A.M.I. Show, The Cool Ones (as "Whiz-Bam Girl"), TV's Shindig!, and Hullabaloo.

I don't know anything about John Harris, who directed this short film, but he and Teri Garr obviously had a lot of fun making this on Hollywood Boulevard in downtown Los Angeles. It's worth watching just to see how much comedic possibility can come out of the simplest of situations. (If The Groundlings had existed then, it's hard to imagine Garr not rising through the sketch-comedy ranks there.)

In the late 1960s, Garr had her first speaking part in the movie Head (1968), which showcased the zany energy of The Monkees (and includes one of their best tracks, "Porpoise Song").

Soon she had a speaking role as Roberta Lincoln, in an episode of Star Trek that was considered a "backdoor pilot" -- that is, a possible new TV show that was given a test run as part of the plot of a current one. Garr played a secretary in "Assignment Earth," in which the crew of the USS Enterprise warp back in time to a Manhattan office where a man named Gary Seven needs to stop a calamity.

I haven't seen the episode yet, but it appears to put Garr at odds with Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock in a colorful way. Her inclusion in the original Star Trek run earned Garr nerd cachet for life, even though she apparently did not enjoy the experience -- perhaps owing to Gene Roddenberry being kind of a dillweed behind the scenes.

Teri Garr was busy, busy, busy throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s, fielding performances on scores of TV shows and movies. (I get a chuckle out of one title, 1967's The Hardy Boys: Mystery of the Chinese Junk.)

She showed up on The Andy Griffith Show, several episodes of McCloud, one of the original Batman TV episodes, Dr. Kildare, M*A*S*H, The Bob Newhart Show, The Odd Couple, Barnaby Jones, Maude, and so many more. Garr kept at it for most of her career -- never eschewing TV for the more "artistic" world of films.

In the early 1970s, she had the longest run as a comedy player and performer on The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour, where Garr spent 46 episodes as characters such as "Countess Legustav."

The above video clip from a later Cher special goes to show: Everybody was doin' some strong drugs back then. The parties must have been amazing.

In terms of film acting, 1974 was a big year for Teri Garr. In Francis Ford Coppola's The Conversation, she plays Amy, who is a girlfriend of the lead character Harry Caul, played by Gene Hackman.

Director Coppola was the hottest young ticket in town, coming off of 1972's The Godfather, and also releasing The Godfather II the same year as The Conversation.

In this film, Garr's character was the first in what would be a recurring role for her: As a jilted girlfriend or wife to a lead male character. In this case, Hackman's character is so secretive that he refuses to tell her anything about himself, a trait that turns out to be his tragic flaw. Sadly, he pushes him for a closer relationship but he pulls away.  (Her character seems vaguely based on the wife in 1972's The Heartbreak Kid, who also is often seen inert in a bedroom -- a loyal but unexciting companion.)

Nonetheless, it's one of many instances where, as an audience member, you want to yell through the screen at the guy and say, "How the (#)*^#&#(*^ could you reject Teri Garr, you oaf!?" Oh well -- such is art.

It's one of several times that Garr worked with both Gene Hackman and Francis Ford Coppola over the years.

Young Frankenstein was Teri Garr's breakout role, where she played the heavily accented Inga alongside Gene Wilder for most of the movie. (Garr later said she based her thick accent on one of the German-speaking crew members from the Sonny & Cher program.)

It was a great year for Mel Brooks, too. That year, he also released Blazing Saddles, and the two films were among the highest moneymaking and most popular pictures that year (with Towering Inferno being number one).

Though Blazing Saddles was the most successful of the two, Young Frankenstein is the one you'll hear quoted most these days. Among the most-repeated lines in Teri Garr's scenes:

• "He would have an enormous schwanzschtücker. Voof!"
• "What knockers!"
• "Put! The candle! Back!"
•  "Roll, roll, roll in ze hay!"

The film also includes wonderful moments from Madeline Kahn, Marty Feldman, Peter Boyle, Cloris Leachman, and Gene Hackman.

After you see the film, check out these bloopers too. The cast was having a blast.

For a generation of young moviegoers, this great early Steven Spielberg movie from 1977 was the first time seeing Teri Garr on screen.

Garr plays Ronnie Neary, the suburban wife to main character, Ron Neary (Richard Dreyfuss). It's yet another of what people might call a "thankless role" because Garr's character again ends up as the neglected/rejected/broken-up companion, though really it's a critical and important role and Garr nails it.

Spielberg's brilliant, creative, dreamlike film about UFOs and aliens is something that works on multiple levels: On one level, it's a completely literal story about what it might be like if benevolent aliens visited the planet and handpicked empathetic humans to connect with. On another level, it's a metaphoric tale about global communication through art and music.

On yet another level, it's an artistic statement about seeking a larger view of life and existence, outside of the limited boundaries of American suburban formula. And then on top of that, you can see (especially since The Fabelmans) that Spielberg's screenplay draws from his own damaged childhood when his parents divorced.

When Garr and Dreyfuss fall apart, his character is seeking a view beyond suburbia, and she's disconnected from his search. They are broken, but that doesn't mean Garr is a villain: The two are just out of step. There's been a lot said and written about the story's cruel side, with Dreyfuss abandoning not only his wife but his children, and Spielberg has said if he wrote it again he'd do it differently.

In any case, Garr's performance is shaded and works well: You can see how Dreyfuss would feel distant from her, but you also understand her frustration with him. When he tears up their living room, her anger turns to confusion turns to a resigned sadness, and back again as she piles the kids into their station wagon and heads off to her mother's. It's funny, it's sad, it's dreamlike, and there are aliens.

Garr had a similar role in another popular, more comedic film from the same year, Oh God!, starring John Denver and George Burns. (See a highlight here.)

After Young Frankenstein and her other works, Teri Garr was now a big-name comedic actress, but she still was also the one you wanted in your wacky, low-budget short film. Enter Steve Martin and Buck Henry. They put her in this (award-winning) absurdist spoof, which was Steve Martin's first foray into film work before he and director Carl Reiner made 1979's The Jerk.

Francis Ford Coppola's Zoetrope studios was behind this movie, which critic Pauline Kael described as "the greatest children's film ever made." Adapted from Walter Farley's 1941 book, the movie was directed by Carroll Ballard, with a screenplay by Melissa Mathison, whose intuitive sensibility about children's storytelling was part of the success of E.T. a few years later.

Teri Garr plays the mother to the main character, Alec Ramsey, who discovers a wild black stallion at sea and forges a friendship with the animal during a series of adventures... or something like that. I haven't seen the film (yet), but Kael's description of its "sensuous, trancelike quality" with a "magical atmosphere" that is "outside of time" makes me want to put it high on my list. And Garr is said to be exceptionally good as well. (She also appeared in a sequel, The Black Stallion Returns, in 1983.)

The comedy and acting world often showcases its heroes on the stage of Saturday Night Live, and it did so for Teri Garr on three occasions: In 1980, 1983, and 1985. Check out the clip above, featuring Garr's opening monologue.

Francis Ford Coppola's ungodly stressful production of Apocalypse Now in 1979 led to him changing gears to an extreme level, undoubtedly to save his sanity. In addition to directing an episode of Faerie Tale Theatre (see above), Coppola steeped himself in music and dance with the 1982 romantic musical One from the Heart.

The story, set in the neon glow of Las Vegas, sesems to be a thin premise about a dissatisfied couple's exploration of their separate sexual fantasies. Loaded with sexual energy and dancing, it features Teri Garr in the lead role opposite Frederic Forrest, with their fantasy partners including Raul Julia and Nastassia Kinski. Music includes songs from Tom Waits and Crystal Gayle.

The critics were harsh. Pauline Kael called the film a "jewelled version of a film student's experimental pastiche." She also said it has a "confectionary artistry" that could be "eerily charming," so she kinda liked it, at least a little. Teri Garr gets to dance and frolic throughout, and the movie has been reevaluated positively over the decades, along with a lot of Coppola's other 1980s work. Perhaps in a few decades people will appreciate Megalopolis too.

From 1982 to 1987, the actress Shelley Duvall created and hosted this live-action Showtime series that highlighted many beloved children's stories, and featured noteworthy performers in often comedy-tinged updates of Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Anderson (among other folklore authors) tales.

The first season's opener was "The Frog Prince," written and directed by Monty Python's Eric Idle, with Teri Garr playing the princess opposite Robin Williams as the princely frog, and future Seinfeld neighbor Michael Richards as King Geoffrey. The show playfully included lines in which Garr scolded Williams for being too much of a "horny toad."

The show is due for a revisit -- take a look at the video above.

Tootsie was 1982's massive comedy-drama hit, a story about a struggling New York actor who desperately auditions for, and earns, the key role on a popular soap opera while pretending to be a woman. To both his chagrin and delight, he becomes a national phenomenon, all while having to keep his gender a secret. For 1982, the film wove in a fairly progressive feminist statement, though at this point it's something of a time capsule, though still a lot of fun.

Sydney Pollack directed the screwball story that starred Dustin Hoffman, Jessica Lange, Charles Durning, Bill Murray, Dabney Coleman (with whom Garr would later costar, in Short Time), and the first major on-screen appearance of Geena Davis.

Teri Garr plays a pivotal role as Dustin Hoffman's acting friend, and it's Garr's character (Sandy Lester) who leads Hoffman to the audition that he attends in drag. Hoffman's character ends up sleeping with Garr to avoid being caught changing into women's clothing, and once again, Garr's role is rather thankless -- but again, she plays a doormat with a full sense of dignity and comedic grace.

Garr was nominated as Best Supporting Actress for Tootsie, but it was rather unfair because her co-star, the new-on-the-scene (and brilliant in her own way) Jessica Lange, was nominated for the same honor -- even though Lange's role merited Best Actress status. Lange won, which makes sense, but Garr certainly deserved the nomination, because the film highlighted her many strengths as a comedic actress.

Coming off of the success of Tootsie, Teri Garr was probably on the short list for anybody casting a movie about people changing gender roles. So it is hardly surprising that she was the co-star in Mr. Mom, opposite Michael Keaton, making his big-screen debut. Keaton played a sidelined auto-industry engineer who finds himself a stay-at-home dad to three kids while his wife's career, as an advertising executive, takes off.

Garr plays the career woman (who might well be called "Mrs. Dad"). Fans of the movie often quote one of the key ads from her workplace, for Schooner Tuna -- "the tuna with a heart." Martin Mull, who we also lost in 2024, also stars, along with Ann Jillian and Christopher Lloyd. (If you talk to one of the movie's fans, before long they'll quote Keaton's confused line about "220, 221, whatever it takes." It's funny if you see it in context.)

The 1970s and '80s were very good decades for Garr, a workaholic whose other film titles included Honky Tonk Freeway, The Escape Artist, The Sting II, Firstborn, Miracles, Full Moon in Blue Water (costarring again with Gene Hackman), Let It Ride (costarring again with Richard Dreyfuss), and Out Cold.

What are your favorites? Tell us about them in the comments section below.

It wouldn't be right to round up Teri Garr's film roles without a pit stop to discuss her intensely quirky turn in After Hours, a black comedy occurring over a single night in New York City.

If you get a chance, read Garr's 2008 interview (by Sean O'Neal) in the Onion's AV Club, where she summarizes several parts of her career without holding back. She seems not only proud of her work in After Hours but just digs it as a film, mentioning how lucky she feels to have worked with so many great directors, and also praising the movie's other kooky performance by co-star Catherine O'Hara -- a comedy legend in her own right.

Garr, though, is wonderful, and her strange character ties together some of the random elements found elsewhere in this dreamlike, urban take on the circles of hell in Dante's Inferno. Garr's charcter initially seems like a friendly diner waitress, helping main character Griffin Dunne after he loses his wallet while pursuing romance with another of several oddball women (the mysteriously damaged Rosanna Arquette, along with her sultry roommate Linda Fiorentino).

Garr's performance is a standout among a cast that includes everyone from John Heard, to Verna Bloom, to Bronson Pinchot, to Will Patton, to Cheech and Chong.

Her character brings Dunne back to her apartment, where she sketches Dunne while talking about The Monkees. She seems to still be living in the 1960s groovy era -- which is, indeed, where Garr began her career. As Dunne becomes increasingly agitated, Garr becomes increasingly enamored of him, until finally he snaps while she tries to give him a plaster-of-paris bagel that links to a previous character. Somehow, Garr ends up becoming one of Dunne's main antagonists, leading a group that's trying to hunt him down out of a mistaken belief he's behind a string of local robberies.

If that doesn't make sense, well, just see the movie. It's one of those in-between movies Scorsese made for sheer directing joy, while waiting to get financing for The Last Temptation of Christ (1987) -- which probably informed a bit of After Hours's underlying religious symbolism.

Mom and Dad Save the World is one of those pictures a lot of children of the early 1990s saw, even if everybody else didn't. The film is a science-fiction comedy in which Garr, a suburban mom, is kidnapped by a farcical, dim-witted alien (Jon Lovitz) and taken to an oddball planet populated by creatures with fish heads and bulldog heads. Or something.

The movie looks very colorful, and everything in the preview video (above) seems to be peak early '90s, with all the pastel colors and overproduction audiences had gotten accustomed to during the 1980s. Jeffrey Jones, still a comedy commodity after Ferris Bueller's Day off and Beetlejuice, plays the dad (unfortunate in retrospect, given his later scandals), while other cast notables include Wallace Shawn, sporty pinup model Kathy Ireland, and Monty Python's Eric Idle -- another of Garr's former collaborators.

The film might be due for a revival, as it does appear to be a fun, fever-dream-ish spectacle, with a kind of Oompa Loompa vibe, and yet another chance for Garr to have fun dancing.

Teri Garr had a brief role in Dumb and Dumber as the stepmom to Mary Swanson (or is it Slappy? Swampy? Samsonite?), played by Lauren Holly. That means that Teri Garr is in at least one of the Top 10 comedy films for three decades in a row: Young Frankenstein in the '70s, Tootsie in the '80s, and Dumb & Dumber in the 1990s.

For anybody who hasn't seen Dumb and Dumber, it has one of the most accurate titles of any film since 12 Angry Men. Jim Carrey and Jeff Daniels play two idiotic friends who decide it's their fate to take a lost briefcase from Providence, Rhode Island to Aspen, Colorado in pursuit of love and adventure.

Teri Garr's character is a well-heeled socialite who interprets the dorky duo's unusual top-hat-and-tuxedo outfits and inept behavior as the antics of wealthy eccentrics. She dominates them with twinkle-eyed glee, and delivers the line "What do you say?" as an aggressive command lurking within a polite suggestion. The movie was a boundary-pushing classic of its time, and Garr's scene fits right in with the outlandishness.

Unfortunately, this was one of the last really prominent movie roles for Garr. She did have parts in Pret-a-Porter, The Player, Perfect Alibi, and Michael (alongside John Travolta), A Simple Wish, Changing Habits, and an uncredited appearance alongside Bob Balaban for the indie standout Ghost World, but Garr's health diagnosis (mentioned below) was taking its toll.

Fans of the beloved hit TV series Friends (1994-2004) fondly remember Teri Garr's three appearances as Phoebe Abbott, the surprise birth mother to Phoebe Buffay (Lisa Kudrow).

Garr was first in the Season 3 finale, titled "The One at the Beach." She then appeared in Season 4 for two episodes, titled "The One with the Jellyfish" and "The One with Phoebe's Uterus."

Many fans were astounded not just by the two blond women's facial similarity, but their comedic mannerisms and styles. Lisa Kudrow's offbeat, fun, neurotic performing style is clearly cut from the same cloth that Teri Garr perfected over the years om works like Young Frankenstein, and fans still express joy at the interplay between Garr and Kudrow on those three episodes, which are not at all "floopy." (Or are they? I'm not up on Friends expressions.)

By this time, the symptoms of Garr's MS (multiple sclerosis) condition had become more severe, and she had developed a limp, which the Friends show edited to avoid showing. Nonetheless, her comedic timing and warm personality remained in full bloom.

David Letterman's late-night shows had a few recurring guests who, because they were New Yorkers and had good banter with Letterman, filled in whenever other guests canceled. Teri Garr, first interviewed by Letterman in 1982,  was one such guest (others included Tony Randall and Charles Grodin).

Garr already had proven herself a charming chatter on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, but what she had with Letterman went beyond regular repartee into full-scale flirting and teasing. You really have to see Garr on Letterman to see her in her element, and understand what a partygoing, disarming quality she had. Garr could say something so honest it seemed mean, but say it in a way that somehow ended up delighting the person she was dressing down. Letterman completely ate it up, and a lot of people speculated he was in love with her.

Letterman took his fondness for Garr to a weird level when he had her on the show in 1985 and, apparently surprising her, took cameras into his dressing room slash office, where Garr was showering. See it for yourself -- it looks like playful fun, perhaps staged, or perhaps something Garr rolled with as she did with everything else, but it was questionable enough that Letterman would later apologize. The notoreity of the episode was such that Garr posed (chastely) for a commemorative photo shoot in Playboy in 1988.

Garr continued to show up as a favorite guest on Letterman's show until a final appearance in which she was very much ailing from multiple sclerosis. Letterman addressed the audience before Garr came out, so they would not be alarmed by her condition. Then Letterman stood up, took Garr by the arm, and helped her to her interviewee chair.

You can find a lot of Garr's Letterman-show appearances on YouTube, but the clip released officially by David Letterman (above) is a fine place to start. Then check out this collection of clips.

Even though Teri Garr had the chronic disease MS (multiple sclerosis), she stayed in the game as much as possible from the late 1990s going into the 2000s, retiring from on-screen work around 2011.

Some of Garr's latter appearances included the Nixon-era comedy Dick (starring Kirsten Dunst, Michelle Williams, and several cast members from both SNL and Kids in the Hall). Garr would also be in a direct-to-video movie called Life Without Dick, perhaps out of a respect for career-titles paradox.

Garr lended her voice to animated features including Beyond Batman: Return of the Joker, Aloha Scooby-Doo!, and the live-action Casper Meets Wendy. Among her last film appearances (alongside several TV roles) were a Paul Feig-directed Christmas comedy called Unaccompanied Minors, writer-director Cecilia Miniucchi's comedy Expired, and a super-cute indie film called Kabluey (2007).

Special mention to Kabluey here: It's an under-the-radar, film-festival-circuit flick that's worth tracking down and watching sometime. It stars Scott Prendergast (who also wrote and directed), with fun roles for Christine Taylor (of The Brady Bunch Movie fame), Jeffrey Dean Morgan (best-known as Negan on The Walking Dead TV show), and Angela Sarafyan (the Armenian-American beauty you might recall from the first season of HBO's Westworld).

Mainly, though, it stars Lisa Kudrow, and the chance to see Kudrow on-screen in the same film with Teri Garr might be especially fun for those who enjoyed their Friends episodes together.

The movie has a very era-specific premise. It involves an out-of-work husband who takes a job wearing a logo-like suit as the corporate mascot for a failing corporation. He stands by the side of the road handing out flyers, and ends up attacked by an angry woman whom the Enron-like company had shafted. That woman is played by Teri Garr, who gives her all for a completely unhinged role that makes her vindictive turn in After Hours look comparatively mild. Right to the end, Garr was fearless.

I talked to Scott Prendergast about the film several years ago, and though he wasn't 100% happy with everything in the movie, he spoke nothing but praises about Garr, and admitted he'd had a lifelong crush on her and jumped at the chance to put her in his film.

The Moth, a non-profit in New York, is a confessional storytelling series that has a radio show and podcasts. In 2012, Teri Garr lended her considerable storytelling prowess for a six-minute piece titled "Wake Up Call."

As usual, Teri Garr is cute as hell while telling a story about a morning in 1989 when she received a call from a woman who informed him that Garr's boyfriend had been sleeping with her, along with several other women. Garr talks about being livid, gathering her boyfriend's stuff, and pulling up to his Bel Air house to throw his items on the doorstep. Pretty soon she's smashing all his house's windows with a hammer. It goes on from there, including a meeting with a starstruck police officer, a visit to an art gallery show attended by Lauren Hutton and Angelica Huston, and the shared stories of other women who got creative forms of revenge after being cheated on.

Somehow, telling this unhappy, near-homicidal-level personal story Garr still seems....bubbly?

According to published reports, in 1999, Teri Garr was officially diagnosed with multiple sclerosis (MS), a progressive disease that affects the nerve cells. Garr had experienced symptoms going back to 1982, around the time she was in Tootsie. Garr made her diagnosis public in 2002, after which she became active in the National MS Society, attending presentations and hosting fundraisers.

As many as one million people in the United States have MS, which affects people for varying durations, and often can be managed for many years, though a cure has not been found. Other public figures with MS diagnoses have included Annetted Funicello, Richard Pryor, Joan Didion, Montel Williams, Neil Cavuto, Selma Blair, and Christina Applegate.

Without a doubt, Garr would want her fans to contribute to the National MS Society, which funds research and provides essential resources for patients.