Television
Early appearances
Moore's television career began with a job as "Happy Hotpoint", a tiny elf dancing on Hotpoint appliances in TV commercials during the 1950s series Ozzie and Harriet.[19] After appearing in 39 Hotpoint commercials in five days, she received approximately $6,000.[20] She became pregnant while still working as "Happy", and Hotpoint ended her work when it became too difficult to conceal her pregnancy with the elf costume.[19] Moore modeled anonymously on the covers of record albums, and auditioned for the role of the elder daughter of Danny Thomas for his long-running TV show, but was turned down.[21][22] Much later, Thomas explained that "she missed it by a nose ... no daughter of mine could ever have a nose that small".[22]
Moore's first regular television role was as a mysterious and glamorous telephone receptionist in Richard Diamond, Private Detective. It is erroneously reported that in the show her voice was heard but only her legs appeared on camera, adding to the character's mystique.[23] Her legs appeared in episode three of the third season, but she was cleverly shot above the waist in other episodes with her face at least partially hidden.[citation needed] About this time, she guest-starred in John Cassavetes' NBC detective series Johnny Staccato, and also in the series premiere of The Tab Hunter Show in September 1960 and the Bachelor Father episode "Bentley and the Big Board" in December 1960. In 1961, Moore appeared in several big parts in movies and on television, including Bourbon Street Beat, 77 Sunset Strip, Surfside 6, Wanted: Dead or Alive, Steve Canyon, Hawaiian Eye, Thriller and Lock-Up. She also appeared in a February 1962 episode of Straightaway.
The Dick Van Dyke Show (1961–1966)
In 1961, Carl Reiner cast Moore in The Dick Van Dyke Show, a weekly series based on Reiner's own life and career as a writer for Sid Caesar's television variety show Your Show of Shows, telling the cast from the outset that it would run for no more than five years. The show was produced by Danny Thomas' company, and Thomas himself recommended her. He remembered Moore as "the girl with three names" whom he had turned down earlier.[24] Moore's energetic comic performances as Van Dyke's character's wife, begun at age 24 (11 years Van Dyke's junior), made both the actress and her signature tight capri pants extremely popular, and she became internationally known. When she won her first Emmy Award for her portrayal of Laura Petrie,[25] she said, "I know this will never happen again."[26] When playing Laura Petrie, Moore would also often wear the fashion attire of Jackie Kennedy, such as capri pants, and resonated with the "feel-good nature" of the Kennedy Administration's Camelot.[27]
The Mary Tyler Moore Show (1970–1977)
In 1970, after having appeared earlier in a pivotal one-hour musical special called Dick Van Dyke and the Other Woman, Moore and husband Grant Tinker successfully pitched a sitcom centered on Moore to CBS. The Mary Tyler Moore Show was a half-hour newsroom sitcom featuring Ed Asner as her gruff boss Lou Grant. The Mary Tyler Moore Show became a touchpoint of the Women's Movement for its portrayal of an independent working woman, which challenged the traditional woman's role in marriage and family.[28][8] The show also marked the first big hit for film and television producer James L. Brooks, who would also do more work for Moore and Tinker's production company.[29]
Moore's show proved so popular that three other regular characters, Valerie Harper as Rhoda Morgenstern, Cloris Leachman as Phyllis Lindstrom and Ed Asner as Lou Grant were also spun off into their own series, and again featured Brooks and his former production partner Allan Burns as producers. The premise of the single working woman's life, alternating during the program between work and home, became a television staple.[24][30] After six years of ratings in the top 20,[31] the show slipped to number 39 during season seven.[32] Producers asked that the series be canceled because of falling ratings, afraid that the show's legacy might be damaged if it were renewed for another season.[32] Despite the decline in ratings, the 1977 season would go on to garner its third straight Emmy Award for Outstanding Comedy.[33] During its seven seasons, the program won 29 Emmys in total (Moore herself winning three times for Best Lead Actress in a sitcom).[34] That record remained unbroken until 2002, when the NBC sitcom Frasier won its 30th Emmy.[34]
Later projects
During season six of The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Moore appeared in a musical/variety special for CBS titled Mary's Incredible Dream,[35] which featured Ben Vereen. In 1978, she starred in a second CBS special, How to Survive the '70s and Maybe Even Bump Into Happiness. This time, she received significant support from a strong lineup of guest stars: Bill Bixby, John Ritter, Harvey Korman and Dick Van Dyke. In the 1978–79 season, Moore starred in two unsuccessful CBS variety series. The first, Mary, featured David Letterman, Michael Keaton, Swoosie Kurtz and Dick Shawn in the supporting cast. After CBS canceled that series, it brought Moore back in March 1979 in a new, retooled show, The Mary Tyler Moore Hour. Described as a "sit-var" (part situation comedy/part variety series), it had Moore portraying a TV star putting on a variety show.[31] The program lasted just 11 episodes.[36]
In the 1985–86 season, she returned to CBS in a sitcom titled Mary, which suffered from poor reviews, sagging ratings, and strife within the production crew. According to Moore, she asked the network to pull the show as she was unhappy with the direction of the program and the producers.[37] She also starred in the short-lived Annie McGuire in 1988.[38] In 1995, after another lengthy break from TV series work, Moore was cast as tough, unsympathetic newspaper owner Louise "the Dragon" Felcott on the CBS drama New York News, the third series in which her character was involved in the news media. As she had with 1985's Mary, Moore quickly became unhappy with the nature of her character and was negotiating with producers to get out of her contract for the series when it was canceled.[39]
In the mid-1990s, Moore appeared as herself on two episodes of Ellen. She also guest-starred on Ellen DeGeneres's next TV show, The Ellen Show, in 2001. In 2004, Moore reunited with her Dick Van Dyke Show castmates for a reunion special called The Dick Van Dyke Show Revisited.[40]
In 2006, Moore guest-starred as Christine St. George, the high-strung host of a fictional TV show, in three episodes of the Fox sitcom That '70s Show.[41] Moore's scenes were shot on the same soundstage where The Mary Tyler Moore Show was filmed in the 1970s.[41] Moore made a guest appearance on the season two premiere of Hot in Cleveland, which starred her former co-star Betty White.[42] This marked the first time that White and Moore had worked together since The Mary Tyler Moore Show ended in 1977.[43] In the fall of 2013, Moore reprised her role on Hot in Cleveland in a season four episode which not only reunited Moore and White, but also former MTM cast members Cloris Leachman, Valerie Harper and Georgia Engel as well. This reunion coincided with Harper's public announcement that she had been diagnosed with terminal brain cancer and was given only a few months to live.[44]
Theater
Moore appeared in several Broadway plays. She was the star of a new musical version of Breakfast at Tiffany's in December 1966, but the show, titled Holly Golightly, was a flop that closed in previews before opening on Broadway. In reviews of performances in Philadelphia and Boston, critics "murdered" the play in which Moore claimed to be singing with bronchial pneumonia.[45]
She starred in Whose Life Is It Anyway with James Naughton, which opened on Broadway at the Royale Theatre on February 24, 1980, and ran for 96 performances, and in Sweet Sue, which opened at the Music Box Theatre on January 8, 1987, later transferred to the Royale Theatre, and ran for 164 performances.
During the 1980s, Moore and her production company produced five plays: Noises Off, The Octette Bridge Club, Joe Egg, Benefactors, and Safe Sex.[46]
Moore appeared in previews of the Neil Simon play Rose's Dilemma at the off-Broadway Manhattan Theatre Club in December 2003 but quit the production after receiving a critical letter from Simon instructing her to "learn your lines or get out of my play".[47] Moore had been using an earpiece on stage to feed her lines to the repeatedly rewritten play.[48]
Films
Moore made her film debut in a bit as a nurse in the Jack Lemmon comedy Operation Mad Ball (1957). Her first speaking part came in X-15 (1961).[49] Following her success on The Dick Van Dyke Show, she appeared in a string of films in the late 1960s (after signing an exclusive contract with Universal Pictures), including Thoroughly Modern Millie (1967), as a would-be actress in 1920s New York who is taken under the wing of Julie Andrews' title character, and two films released in 1968, What's So Bad About Feeling Good? with George Peppard, and Don't Just Stand There! with Robert Wagner. She starred opposite Elvis Presley as a nun in Change of Habit (1969).[50] Moore's future television castmate Ed Asner appeared in the film as a police officer.[51]
After not appearing in another feature film for eleven years, Moore returned to the big screen in the coming-of-age drama Ordinary People (1980). For her role as a grieving mother unable to cope either with the drowning death of one of her sons or the subsequent suicide attempt of her surviving son (played by Timothy Hutton who won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his performance), she received her first and only Oscar nomination.[4][52] Despite that success, Moore shot only two more films in the next fifteen years: the poorly received Six Weeks (1982)[53] and Just Between Friends (1986).[54] She returned to films with the independent hit Flirting with Disaster (1996).[55]
Moore appeared in the television movie Run a Crooked Mile (1969), and after the conclusion of her series in 1977, she starred in several television movies, including First, You Cry (1978), which brought her an Emmy nomination for portraying NBC correspondent Betty Rollin's struggle with breast cancer. Her later TV films included the medical drama Heartsounds (1984) with James Garner, which brought her another Emmy nomination, Finnegan Begin Again (1985) with Robert Preston, which earned her a CableACE Award nomination, the 1988 mini-series Lincoln, which brought her another Emmy nod for playing Mary Todd Lincoln, and Stolen Babies, for which she won an Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actress in 1993.[56] Later she reunited with old co-stars in Mary and Rhoda (2000) with Valerie Harper, and The Gin Game (2003) (based on the Broadway play), reuniting her with Dick Van Dyke. Moore starred in Like Mother, Like Son (2001), playing convicted murderer Sante Kimes.
Memoirs
Moore wrote two memoirs. In the first, After All, published in 1995, she acknowledged being a recovering alcoholic,[57] while in Growing Up Again: Life, Loves, and Oh Yeah, Diabetes (2009), she focuses on living with type 1 diabetes.[58]
MTM Enterprises
Moore and her husband Grant Tinker founded MTM Enterprises, Inc. in 1969.[59] This company produced The Mary Tyler Moore Show and other successful television shows and films. It also included a record label, MTM Records.[60] MTM Enterprises produced American sitcoms and drama television series such as Rhoda, Lou Grant and Phyllis (all spin-offs from The Mary Tyler Moore Show), The Bob Newhart Show, The Texas Wheelers, WKRP in Cincinnati, The White Shadow, Friends and Lovers, St. Elsewhere, Newhart, and Hill Street Blues, and was later sold to Television South, an ITV Franchise holder in 1988.[61][59] The MTM logo resembles the Metro Goldwyn Mayer logo, but with a cat named Mimsie instead of a lion.[62]