Mary Tyler Moore, 1936-2017

I first became aware of Mary Tyler Moore nearly 60 years ago. More precisely, I became aware of her legs, occasionally her lips, and her low, sultry voice when she portrayed Richard Diamond’s telephone answering service on the TV program Richard Diamond, Private Investigator, known only as “Legs”. What can I say? It was the 1950s, a different world.

Then she was Laura Petrie, formerly a talented dancer and then the long-suffering wife of comedy writer Rob Petrie on The Dick Van Dyke Show. A wife and mother. And then she was Mary Richards, a young woman struggling to “make it after all” with a career in television news production. There’s a statue of Mary Richards in downtown Minneapolis.

For twenty years her personae documented the changes in American society from the 1950s to the 1970s, each of the roles iconic. Now Mary Tyler Moore has died. From her obituary in the New York Times:

Mary Tyler Moore, whose witty and graceful performances on two top-rated television shows in the 1960s and ’70s helped define a new vision of American womanhood, died on Wednesday in Greenwich, Conn. She was 80.

Her family said her death, at Greenwich Hospital, was caused by cardiopulmonary arrest after she had contracted pneumonia.

Ms. Moore faced more than her share of private sorrow, and she went on to more serious fare, including an Oscar-nominated role in the 1980 film “Ordinary People” as a frosty, resentful mother whose son has died. But she was most indelibly known as the incomparably spunky Mary Richards on the CBS hit sitcom “The Mary Tyler Moore Show.” Broadcast from 1970 to 1977, it was produced by both Ms. Moore and her second husband, the CBS executive Grant Tinker, who died on Nov. 28.

She had a few prominent movie roles and her own television production company but she will be remembered for her television stardom and the always-endearing characters she played there.