Mary Tyler Moore

Diagnoses

Personal

Vocation

Lifestyle

Notable

Traits

Family

American actress and TV executive. Named "America's Sweetheart," Moore was a six time Emmy winner, Academy Award nominee for Best Actress, winner of two Golden Globe Awards and a Tony Award nominee. Her own TV series "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" in the 1970s was a smash hit. With a 30 year acting career on TV, stage and screen, Moore's ever smiling persona belied an inner life of turmoil and denial. Mary was the oldest of three children of John Moore, an employee at a utilities company and his homemaker wife Marge, a troubled woman whose husband's dark side led her to closet drinking. While growing up in Flushing, New York, grandmother Mabel and maternal Aunt Bertie lived nearby and helped to provide Mary and her younger brother John a stable environment that her taskmaster father and indisposed mother could not always give. When the Moore family moved to Los Angeles after World War II, Grandma and Aunt Bertie followed. Moore took up dancing at a local dance studio and "after being ignored as a dancer, I realized I was going to have to be an actress." The day after she graduated Immaculate Heart High School in Los Angeles, Moore was hired as the Hot Point pixie dancing on a stove in TV commercials during the "Ozzie and Harriet Show," earning $10,000 a year in 1954. One month after graduating high school she married boy-next-door salesman Richard Meeker and had their son Richard the following year. Young Richard was primarily raised by the usual entourage of Grandma Mabel, Aunt Bertie and Moore's mother, who had just given birth to her own third child. Years of bit parts on TV followed for the Hot Point pixie. After being turned down for the role of Danny Thomas' daughter in the sitcom "Make Room for Daddy," in 1961 Moore auditioned, at Danny Thomas's request, for the role of the wife in the upcoming series "The Dick Van Dyke Show." She got the part and successfully entered the living rooms of the American public as Laura Petrie, a dancer who gave up her career in show business to be a wife and mother. The public adored her. The role of Laura Petrie was an ironic mirror image of Moore's own life, as her success as an actress precluded her being a wife or a mother. "There was no question about it. By the time Richie was five, I had already let him down. When he needed me the most, I was busier and even more self-concerned that I had been when he was an impressionable infant. My Richie and the Richie in the show were born only months apart. But I never felt guilty about not staying home; that was not a life I was interested in. I always wanted to be a performer." The first year the "Dick Van Dyke Show" was aired in 1961, Moore won the Emmy for Best Actress. She divorced Meeker the following year and her continued success won her another Emmy in 1966, the final year of the show. From 19 September 1970, she had her own series, "The Mary Tyler Moore Show," that ran to rave reviews to a public so adoring they named her "America's Sweetheart" for the next seven years. Her second marriage was to Grant A. Tinker, a TV executive, on 1 June 1963, soon after her divorce from Meeker. The couple formed TV studio MTM, that ran several successful spin-offs from characters created on the mythic "Mary Tyler Moore Show." The effects of the combination of being a TV mogul and Emmy winning actress who maintained continual success eventually took its toll on Moore and her marriage to Tinker ended the year after the series ended in 1977. Parlaying her success from TV to the screen, Moore won an Academy Award nomination in 1980 for her portrayal of the emotionally frozen wife in "Ordinary People." She then made an appearance on Broadway in the show "Whose Life Is It Anyway?," which earned a Tony Award nomination in 1981 and the film "Six Weeks" in 1982. Moore's dependence on alcohol became obvious and in 1983, after suffering the multiple losses of a second divorce, the death of her beloved son due to an accidental gunshot wound (on 14 October 1980) and the death of her sister from an accidental drug overdose, diabetic Moore signed into the Betty Ford clinic to kick the habit completely. After failed shows "The Mary Tyler Moore Hour" and "Annie McGuire," in the late 1980s, Moore faced combined deaths of her brother and mother within three months. Regrouping her life, she wrote her autobiography "After All" in 1996 without a ghostwriter. By then she was selectively choosing scripts for lead roles in TV movies. Moore made a third marriage on 23 November 1983 to New York cardiologist Dr. Robert Levine, 16 years her junior. They divided their time between New York City and a 21 acre farm in upstate New York. Her second memoir, "Growing Up Again: Life, Loves, and Oh Yeah, Diabetes" (2009), focuses on living with type 1 diabetes. In May 2011, Moore underwent elective brain surgery to remove a benign meningioma. Moore died, aged 80, from cardiopulmonary arrest because of pneumonia, on 25 January 2017 at Greenwich Hospital in Greenwich, Connecticut, after having been placed on a respirator the previous week. Link to Wikipedia biography