In the 1982 comedy classic ToetsieTeri Garr plays Sandy Lester, a struggling actress and close friend of Dustin Hoffman’s Michael Dorsey. Between her chosen profession and her many bad choices when it comes to men, she has been conditioned to be life’s doormat. In an early scene, she talks about being stuck in Michael’s bathroom for half an hour at a party with no one noticing, then admits that, yes, everyone seems to be having a good time. Later, when Michael picks her up for dinner, she somehow apologizes to him. The big role in a soap opera he gets while pretending to be a woman was something Sandy wanted, but when she shows up to the audition, the casting director takes one look at her and doesn’t even let her read.

On the one hand, it’s hard to distance yourself from watching Garr’s performance in that film – for which she received her one and only Oscar nomination.

– and imagine if anyone ever turned her down from an audition, or if she ever had to be so meek. In a role that could so easily be thankless and shrill, where Sandy is nothing more than a self-loathing, inadvertent obstacle between Michael and the romance he really wants, Garr is a force of nature – so funny and so vulnerable that you can. I can’t help but love Sandy despite (or because of?) her copious neuroses. She lost to her co-star, Jessica Lange, even though Garr gives the much more memorable performance. But Lange was nominated for both Supporting and Lead Actress that year, and her excellent work in the film was definitely off the charts Franceswould beat Meryl Streep

Sophie’s choice so the voters gave her the supporting trophy as a consolation prize.On the other hand, although Garr, who died this week at the age of 79 after a long battle with multiple sclerosis, had a much more successful career than Sandy, it never quite turned out the way her prodigious talent should have. She had a legitimate role as a leading actress in films in the early 1980s, but her big hits were usually the projects where someone else was the star. Mister Momfor example, as the title suggests, was more about Garr’s on-screen husband, Michael Keaton, struggling as a stay-at-home dad (a novelty in 1983!) than her character’s bumpy return to the workplace. The films have now been built around Garr, such as the musical Francis Ford Coppola

tended to come and go without much public attention.

Editor’s Choices She was a unique talent, but in a way that was almost too specific for her own good. If no one else is doing exactly what you’re doing – exhausted, neurotic and sexy, but also strangely innocent – ​​it means no one else will beat you for those kinds of roles. It also means that these types of parts will be a lot harder to come by. There was something timeless and unbound in time about Garr. She did a lot of episodic TV guest work in the 1960s, but never really broke through; the closest she came to a failed attempt at one Star Trekspin-off in which she would have played time traveler Gary Seven’s crazed secretary – and was later cast as characters who appeared to be fugitives from that decade. In Martin Scorsese’s cult classic

After hours For example, she plays Julie, a fragile waitress with a beehive hairdo who dances to The Monkees’ “Last Train to Clarksville.” (Not long after, she appeared in a retro video for the Zombies hit “She’s Not There,” again capturing a strong sense of the song’s period of release 22 years earlier.)Her big career break came in one of the greatest film years of all time, 1974, when she gave a pair of very different supporting performances. The better known one is in Mel Brooks’

Related content https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=srOd82nsWpsBut Garr also struck a chord in her brief appearance in Francis Ford Coppola’s

in which she played Amy, mistress of Gene Hackman’s surveillance expert Harry Caul, and the only person who seems to understand him at all: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dWhFW021gwMOne performance is wonderfully cartoonish, the other completely buttoned-up, and both are indelible. Hollywood took notice, but still didn’t quite know what to do with Garr’s strange energy. She spent a lot of time playing wives and mothers in other people’s stories, sometimes with great success (even knowing that Richard Dreyfuss is right when he says aliens really exist). Close Encounters of the Third Kind it’s hard to watch Garr’s work as his nervous wife and not feel complete sympathy for her point of view), sometimes less so (she played third fiddle to George Burns and John Denver in the first episode).

Oh God! film).She steals every minute she’s on screen

even if you share it with both Hoffman and Bill Murray, like this incredible sequence where Sandy finally gets up the courage to confront Michael about all the lies she thinks he’s been telling her: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c0pUtIIwGHoGarr got the Oscar nomination, had big hits in it and Mister Mom and was a staple The tonight show And

during the eighties. In some ways, talk shows proved to be the purest medium for capturing everything that made her so great and distinctive. As she alternately flirted with Letterman and became frustrated with him, it was impossible to tell how much was a little and how much was the real Garr. But like Albert Brooks and several other Hall of Fame talk show guests, it became a masterful performance in its own right. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v9hXd7ve-9AHowever, her quick wit and effervescence never quite translated into long-term commercial success. Garr’s last studio film as a leading man was quickly forgotten in 1992

. She announced in 2002 that she had been diagnosed with MS, suffered a brain aneurysm in 2007 and retired from acting not long after. Popular stories The last fifteen years of Garr’s career were spent primarily on television, including a recurring role Friends that felt like a spiritual passing of the torch. In her portrayal of the crazy masseuse musician Phoebe Buffay, Lisa Kudrow was clearly paying tribute to Garr. (In a statement to

Rolling stone this week, Kudrow called Garr “a comedic acting genius who had and is a huge influence on me.”) In fact, the connection between Kudrow’s work on the hit 1990s sitcom and Garr’s film work in the 1970s and 1980s was so overt, that viewers shouted that Garr would play Phoebe’s mother. Although Phoebe’s backstory dictated that her mother had died by suicide, the writers ultimately found the comedy duo too enamored to pass up. They came up with a solution where Phoebe found out she was adopted, allowing Garr to enter the story as Phoebe’s birth mother and bring her endearing weirdness to a new generation. While it felt bittersweet that another actor had become a superstar, playing a persona similar to the one that brought Garr to more limited fame, it was also a validation of sorts: Garr’s ephemeral qualities. did translate, both to another actor and to tens of millions