LOS ANGELES (AP) – Cloris Leachman, an Oscar winner for her portrayal of a lonely housewife in ‘The Last Picture Show’ and a comic delight as the fearsome Frau Blücher in ‘Young Frankenstein’ and the self-absorbed neighbor Phyllis on “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” passed away. She was 94.
Leachman died in her sleep from natural causes in her home in Encinitas, California, publicist Monique Moss said Wednesday. Her daughter Dinah Englund was by her side, Moss said.
A character of extraordinary magnitude, Leachman defied the prediction. In her early television career, she appeared as Timmy’s mother in the series “Lassie”. She played a frontier prostitute in ‘Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid’, a family member in ‘Crazy Mama’ and Blücher in Mel Brooks’ ‘Young Frankenstein’, in which the mention of her name made a comment.
“Every time I hear a horse howl, I will forever think of Cloris’s memorable Frau Blücher,” Brooks tweeted, calling Leachman “insanely talented” and “irreplaceable.”
Salutes from other admiring colleagues poured in on social media. Steve Martin said Leachman “brought the secrets of comedy to the big and small screen.” “Nothing I could say would exceed the extent of my love for you,” Ed Asner of The Mary Tyler Moore Show posted. “Applause at every entrance and exit,” Rosie O’Donnell said.
“There was no one like Cloris. “With a single glance, she had the ability to break your heart or make you laugh until the tears ran down your face,” Juliet Green, her longtime manager, said in a statement.
In 1989, Leachman toured in ‘Grandma Moses’, a play in which she was 45 to 101 years old. During the nineties of the last century she appeared in the big cities as the wife of the captain in the revival of ‘Show Boat’. In the 1993 film version of The Beverly Hillbillies, she takes on the role of Irene Ryan as Granny Clampett.
She also occasionally played a role as Ida in ‘Malcolm in the Middle’, and won Emmys in 2002 and 2006 for the show. Her Emmy run over the years was a total of eight, including two trophies for Moore’s sitcom, which linked her to Julia Louis-Dreyfus as the best Emmy winners among artists.
In 2008, Leachman joined the ranks of contestants in “Dancing With the Stars,” which did not last long in the competition but pleased the crowd with her sparkling dance costumes, which put her on judges’ lap and spoke during the live broadcast.
She started as Miss Chicago in the Miss America Pageant and willingly accepted impeccable screen roles.
“I really don’t care what I look like, ugly or pretty,” she told an interviewer in 1973. ‘I do not think that’s what beauty is. One day one of us will be ugly or pretty. I’m sad, I can not be the witch in ‘The Wizard of Oz’. But I also want to be the good witch. Phyllis combines them both.
‘I’m so alive. I’m magical, and I believe in magic. There is supposed to be a point in life when you do not have to believe it. I have not reached it yet. ”
During the fifties, Leachman became involved in live TV dramas, showing her versatility, including in roles that represented the casting standards of that era.
“One week I would go on as a Chinese girl, the next as a blonde cockney and weeks later as a dark-haired someone else,” she recalls. In 1955, she debuted in a hard-boiled Mickey Spillane saga, “Kiss Me Deadly” – “I was the naked blonde that Mike Hammer picked up on the dark highway.”
She follows with Rod Serling’s war drama, ‘The Rack’, and a season on ‘Lassie’. She continued in supporting roles on Broadway and in movies, and then achieved her triumph with Peter Bogdanovich’s “The Last Picture Show”, based on the Larry McMurtry novel.
When Leachman received the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress of 1971, she gave a deceptive speech in which she thanked her piano and dance teachers and concluded: “It is for Buck Leachman, who paid the bills.” Her father ran a wood factory.
Despite her photogenic appearance, she is still character traits. Her most indelible role was Phyllis Lindstrom in ‘The Mary Tyler Moore Show’.
Phyllis visited Mary’s apartment regularly and complained about her husband Lars and biting remarks about Mary and especially about her opponent, another tenant, Rhoda Morgenstern (Valerie Harper). Phyllis was so unexpectedly captivating that Leachman starred in his own spin-off series, “Phyllis,” which aired on CBS from 1975 to 1977.
With ‘Young Frankenstein’, Leachman becomes a member of ‘The Mel Brooks Stock Company’, which also appears in ‘High Angs’ and ‘History of the World, Part I’. Her other films included Bogdanovich’s “Daisy Miller” and “Texasville,” which repeated her role in “The Last Picture Show.” In 2009, she released her autobiography, “Cloris”, which made the summary of tabloids for her telling of a ‘wild’ one-night stand with Gene Hackman.
Cloris Leachman grew up on the outskirts of Des Moines, Iowa, where she was born in 1926. The large family lived in an insulated wooden house without running water, but the mother had ambitious ideas for her children. Cloris took piano lessons at the age of 5; since the family could not afford a piano, she practiced on the cardboard to draw the keys.
“I’m going to be a concert pianist,” the girl announces, and her mother encourages her with discussions at churches and civic clubs. She arranged for Cloris to drive a coal truck to Des Moines for an audition for a Drake University student. She gets the role and appears in other plays in a local theater. After high school, she earned a scholarship to study drama at Northwestern University.
Admittedly, Leachman was a poor student and it only lasted a year. While in the Chicago area, she tried out a Miss Chicago beauty pageant and was selected. She competed in the 1946 Miss America pageant in Atlantic City and qualified as a finalist. Her consolation prize: a $ 1,000 talent scholarship.
With new ambition, she’s headed straight to New York, where she worked as an extra in a movie, and Nina Foch in the hit “John Loves Mary.”
There comes more insignificant work, and she enrolls at the Actors Studio to hone her craft. “I finally quit because of the smoke,” she later said. “I could not stand the blue haze.”
In 1953, Leachman married George Englund, later a film director and producer, and they had five children: Adam, Bryan, George, Morgan and Dinah. The couple divorced in 1979. Son Bryan Englund was found dead in 1986 at the age of 30.
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AP authors Beth Harris in Los Angeles and Hillel Italy in New York contributed to this report.
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The late AP Entertainment writer Bob Thomas contributed biographical material to this story.