Cloris Leachman, who has won eight Emmy Awards in six shows and 22 nominations and also won an Oscar for Supporting Actress for The last picture during an excellent career of seven decades, died Tuesday of natural causes in her home in Encinitas, CA. She was 94.
Her manager confirmed the news.
Everett Collection
Some of her most famous roles were recurring as Phyllis Lindstrom in The Mary Tyler Moore Show and its spin-off 1975-77 Phyllis. She also played the cigar competition, violin playing, overemphasized and riotous funny Frau Blücher in Mel Brooks’ 1974 classic horror ghost Young Frankenstein. She reunited with Brooks to play Nurse Diesel in the rise of Alfred Hitchcock in 1977. High anxiety.
More recently, she earned an Emmy nomination for playing the too-hip Maw Maw in Fox sitcom Hope to raise and earned two Emmies and four other numbers for her role as Grandma Ida in the network’s 2000 sitcom Malcolm in the middle, opposite Bryan Cranston and Jane Kaczmarek.
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She also won an Emmy among four nominations for Mary Tyler Moore and a lead actor for Phyllis.
Born on April 30, 1926 in Des Moines, IA, Leachman launched her showbiz career after participating in the Miss America Pageant in 1946 and became hospitable in such early TV series as The Ford Theater, Suspense, Actor’s Studio and The Bob & Ray Show. She continued to work in television as the medium developed and aged, with roles in such classic series as The Twilight Zone, Gunsmoke, Rawhide, The Untouchables, Route 66, Wagon Train, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, 77 Sunset Strip and a recurring episode of more than two dozen episodes of Lassie.
She also began to achieve Broadway roles in the post-war era. After some understudy and a bit of parts, she is as a replacement for the lead role of Ens. Nellie Forbush in the original Main Stem series of the classic Rodgers and Hammerstein musical South Pacific. Leachman appeared in eight other Broadway shows during the 1950s, including As you like, King of Hearts and Masked.
By the early 1970s, Leachman was focused on features and the emerging TV movie genre. On the big screen, she plays Ruth Popper, the lonely middle-aged woman of a gay high school football coach who started a relationship with one of the players (Timothy Bottoms), in Peter Bogdanovich The last picture program. Her performance earned an Oscar for Supporting Actor – one of eight nominations and two victories for the 1971 film which also starred Jeff Bridges, Cybill Shepherd, Ellen Burstyn and Ben Johnson, which won the Oscar for Supporting Actor has.
Leachman’s John Milius’ Dillinger (1973) and again with Bogdanovich and Shepherd for Daisy Miller (1974). Later that year, Leachman would nearly steal the show from an ensemble of actors in Brooks’ poignant parody. Young Frankenstein.
Her character was wonderfully extravagant – just like the black-and-white film in Transylvania, in which Gene Hackman, Teri Garr, Marty Feldman and Madeline Kahn also starred. A recurring gag throughout the filled photo saw horses that were often not seen nervously calling her name. The film remains one of the funniest ever made.
Speaking of ‘funniest ever made’, Leachman continued in the mid 70’s The Mary Tyler Moore Show. It picked up the outstanding comedy series Emmy numbers for its first four seasons – twice lost by Allin the Family and M * A * S * H - before winning the 1975 to 77 category from back to back. In 1974, just before the remarkable run, CBS hailed Valerie Harper’s Rhoda Morgenstern character for the sitcom Rhoda.
Leachman appears in the highly acclaimed wedding episode of Rhoda in 1974, and the show ends in the first ten seasons in the first ten seasons – before the end of the top 10 of the first program Mary Tyler Moore. Following Rhoda ‘s the out-of-the-box success, played the Eye Network Leachman’s character for the 1975 sitcom Phyllis. Broadcast as the run-up to Rhoda On Monday nights, the new series was also an immediate hit, claiming a full season rating with more than Rhoda during 1975-76. But both series were overshadowed by NBC’s hit drama Little House on the Prairie, which moved that season to Monday nights. Phyllis wrapped in 1977, and Rhoda was gone a year later.
Leachman earned an Emmy nomination for the first season of Phyllis a year after winning back-to-back hardware for the role in Mary Tyler Moore.
She continued to record film and TV credits during the 1970s and ’80s before winning her second series role as a replacement for longtime star Charlotte Rae in the NBC hit sitcom. The facts of life. Leachman took over the lead role of the woman in 1986 for the last two of his nine seasons, playing Beverly Ann Sickle, the sister of Rae’s Edna Garrett.
Leachman followed it up with the lead The Nutt House, a short-lived NBC sitcom created by Alan Spencer and Brooks, in which she played a dual role opposite co. High anxiety alum Harvey Korman. The slapstick joke about a former hotel falling on hard times lasted only a handful of episodes.
A few seasons later, NBC linked Leachman to another popular star, Stacy Keach, for Walter and Emily, a multi-generational comedy presented in 1991-92 for one season. That season she also played a one-off role in The Simpsons, and she had a short but memorable voice role in the 1996 function Beavis and Butt-head Do America. She played an elderly woman who ran into the boys several times on the road, referring to them as ‘Travis and Bob’.
Leachman continued to work in the 1990s – then into her 60s and even her 70s. She played another series role as Ellen DeGeneres’ picky mother in CBS The Ellen Show, which was broadcast in 2001-02. Around the same time, she first appeared as Grandma Ida in Fox’s Malcolm in the middle. The role would span a dozen episodes across different seasons, earning her several guest actresses Emmys and six total nominations.
MORE TO COME …