LOS ANGELES – Teri Garr, quirky comedy actress who rose from background dancer in Elvis Presley movies to leading lady in such favorites as “Young Frankenstein” and “Tootsie” is dead. He was 79 years old.

Garr died Tuesday “surrounded by family and friends” of multiple sclerosis, publicist Heidi Schaeffer said. Garr has struggled with other health issues in recent years and had surgery to repair an aneurysm in January 2007.

Fans posted on social media in his honor. writer-director Paul Feig he calls him “truly one of my comedy heroes.” “I couldn’t love him more” and screenwriter Cinco Paul she says: “I was never a star, but I always shined. He made everything he was in better.

The actor, who was sometimes referred to as Terri, Terry or Terry Ann throughout her long career, seemed destined for show business since childhood.

His father was Eddie Garr, a well-known vaudeville comedian; his mother was Phyllis Lind, one of the original high-hitting Rockettes of New York’s Radio City Music Hall. Their daughter started dance lessons at age 6 and began dancing with San Francisco and Los Angeles ballet companies at 14.

He was 16 when he joined the road company of “West Side Story” in Los Angeles and began appearing in small roles in films as early as 1963.

In a 1988 interview, he recalled how he landed the “West Side Story” role. A day after being excluded from the first audition, she returned in different outfits and was accepted.

From there, Garr found steady work dancing in movies, appearing in the chorus of nine Presley films, including “Viva Las Vegas,” “Roustabout” and “Clambake.”

Also included are ‘Star Trek’, ‘Dr. Kildare” and “Batman,” and was a featured dancer in the rock ’n’ roll music show “Shindig,” the rock concert performance TAMI, and was a cast member of “The Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour.”

Her big film break came in 1974 when she played Gene Hackman’s girlfriend. Francis Ford Coppola thriller “The Conversation”. This led to an interview with Mel Brooks; Brooks said that if he could speak with a German accent, he would hire him to play Gene Wilder’s German laboratory assistant in the 1974 movie “Young Frankenstein.”

“Cher had a wig made by a German woman named Renata, and I got the accent from her,” Garr once recalled.

The film established her as a talented comedic actress, with New York film critic Pauline Kael declaring her “the funniest neurotic, stunning woman on the screen.”

His big smile and off-center charm make you say, “Oh my God!” It helped him get a role in the movie. “Mr.,” with George Burns and John Denver. Mom” (as Michael Keaton’s wife) and “Tootsie,” in which she played the girlfriend who loses Dustin Hoffman to Jessica Lange and learns that he is dressing as a woman to revive her career. (She also lost the supporting actress Oscar to Lange at that year’s Academy Awards.)

Although best known for comedy, Garr has shown he can handle drama just as well in films like “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” “Black Stallion” and “Escape Artist.”

“I wanted to do ‘Norma Rae’ and ‘Sophie’s Choice,’ but I never had the chance,” she once said, adding that as a comic actress, she became typecast.

He had a flair for spontaneous humor and frequently played David Letterman’s foil as a guest star on early broadcasts of NBC’s “Late Night With David Letterman.”

His appearances became so frequent and the pair’s good-natured bickering so compelling that for a time rumors arose that they were romantically involved. Years later, Letterman said that these early appearances helped make the show a hit.

Around the same time, Garr began feeling “a little bit of a beeping or ticking noise” in his right leg. It started in 1983 and eventually spread to his right arm, but he felt he could live with it. By 1999, the symptoms had become so severe that he consulted a doctor. Diagnosis: multiple sclerosis.

Garr did not disclose his illness for three years.

“I was afraid of not being able to find a job,” he explained in a 2003 interview. “When people hear about MS, they think, ‘Oh my God, this guy has two days to live.'”

After going public, he became a spokesperson for the National Multiple Sclerosis Society and gave humorous speeches at meetings in the United States and Canada.

“You have to find your center and roll with the punches because that’s the hard thing: making people feel sorry for you,” he commented in 2005. “Just trying to tell people I’m okay is exhausting.”

She also continued acting, appearing in “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit,” “Greetings from Tucson,” “Life with Bonnie” and other TV shows. She also had a brief, recurring role as Lisa Kudrow’s mother on the 1990s series “Friends.” Garr married contractor John O’Neil in 1993. They adopted a daughter named Molly before divorcing in 1996.

In her 2005 autobiography “Speedbumps: Flooring It Through Hollywood,” Garr explained her decision not to discuss her age.

“My mother taught me that people in show business never tell their real age. “He never revealed his own or my father’s,” he wrote.

He said he was born in Los Angeles, although most reference books list him as Lakewood, Ohio. As her father’s career waned, the family, including Teri’s two older brothers, lived with relatives in the Midwest and East.

The Garrs eventually returned to California and settled in the San Fernando Valley, where Teri graduated from North Hollywood High School and studied speech and drama for two years at California State University, Northridge.

Garr recalled what his father told his children in 1988 about pursuing careers in Hollywood.

“Don’t get involved in this,” he told them. “This is the lowest level. “This is a humiliating situation for people,” he said.

Garr is survived by his daughter, Molly O’Neil, and his grandson, Tyryn.

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Bob Thomas, a longtime Associated Press journalist who died in 2014, was the lead author of this obituary. AP Entertainment Writer Mark Kennedy contributed to this report.