Teri Garr, the quirky comedy actress who rose from being a background dancer in Elvis Presley movies to the lead actress in popular films such as Young Frankenstein and Tootsie, has passed away.

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 took to social media in her honor, with writer-director Paul Feig calling her “truly one of my comedy heroes. I couldn’t love her more.”

Screenwriter Cinco Paul said Garr was “never a star, always shining. He made everything he was in better.”

Born into show business

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 six and began dancing with San Francisco and Los Angeles ballet companies at 14.

He was 16 when he joined West Side Story’s road company 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 films, appearing in the chorus of nine Elvis Presley films, including Viva Las Vegas, Roustabout, and Clambake.

She has also appeared in numerous television shows including 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 .

Switching to the big screen

Her big film breakthrough was as Gene Hackman’s girlfriend in the 1974 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 film Young Frankenstein.

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

The film proved her to be a talented comedic performer, with New York film critic Pauline Kael declaring her “the funniest neurotic, stunning woman on the screen.”

His big smile and off-center charm, OMG! In the movie Mr. Mom (as Michael Keaton’s wife) and Tootsie, in which she stars alongside George Burns and John Denver, she plays Dustin Hoffman’s girlfriend who loses him to Jessica Lange and learns that he is dressing as a woman to revive his career.

She also lost the supporting actress Oscar to Lange at that year’s Academy Awards.

Although he’s known for comedy, Garr has shown he can handle drama just as well in films like Close Encounters of the Third Kind, The Black Stallion, and The 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 gift for spontaneous humor and often played David Letterman’s foil during his guest appearances at the start 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.

The public face of MS

Garr also began feeling “a little bit of a beeping or ticking noise” in his right leg around that time.

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 the center and roll with the punches because that’s a hard thing to do: make people feel sorry for you,” he commented in 2005.

“It’s exhausting trying to tell people I’m okay.”

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 on Friends in the 1990s, playing the mother of Phoebe, played by Lisa Kudrow.

Warning from parents to Hollywood

Garr married contractor John O’Neil in 1993.

They adopted a daughter named Molly before divorcing in 1996.

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

“My mother taught me that people in show business never tell their real age,” she wrote.

“He never revealed his or my father’s.”

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.

“It’s a degrading thing for people.”

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

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