Cloris Leachman, who won eight career Emmy awards, covering six programs and 22 nominations, and also won a supporting actress Oscar for The Last Picture Show during an excellent career spanning seven decades, she died Tuesday of natural causes at her home in Encinitas, CA. She was 94 years old.
His manager confirmed the news.
Everett Collection
Among his most famous roles were recurring as Phyllis Lindstrom in The Mary Tyler Moore Show and its 1975-77 spin-off Phyllis. She also played the famous Frau Blücher, who chewed a cigar, played the violin, accented the accent and was extremely funny in Mel Brooks’ 1974 classic horror parody Young Frankenstein. She met with Brooks to play Nurse Diesel at Alfred Hitchcock’s takeoff in 1977 High anxiety.
Most recently, she won an Emmy nomination for playing the popular sitcom Maw Maw on Fox Raising Hope and won two Emmys and four other nominations for her role as Grandma Ida on the 2000s network sitcom Malcolm in the middle, opposite Bryan Cranston and Jane Kaczmarek.
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She also won an Emmy among four nominations for Mary Tyler Moore and a lead actress nomination for Phyllis.
Born on April 30, 1926, in Des Moines, IA, Leachman launched her showbiz career after competing in the 1946 Miss America Pageant and began participating in early TV series such as The Ford Theater, Suspense, Actor’s Studio and The Bob & Ray Show. She continued to work on television as the medium evolved and matured, with roles in classic series like The Twilight Zone, Gunsmoke, Rawhide, The Untouchables, Route 66, Wagon Train, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, 77 Sunset Strip and a recurring part in more than two dozen episodes of Lassie.
She also started scoring roles on Broadway in the postwar period. After a few surrogates and small roles, she was cast as a replacement for Ens. Nellie Forbush in the original main sequence of the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical classic South Pacific. Leachman went on to appear on eight other Broadway shows during the 1950s, including As you like, King of Hearts and Masked.
In the early 1970s, Leachman focused on feature films and the emerging TV genre. On the big screen, she played Ruth Popper, the lonely middle-aged wife of a closeted gay football coach who started an affair with one of the players (Timothy Bottoms), in Peter Bogdanovich’s game The Last Picture Show. Her powerful performance earned her a Supporting Actress Oscar – one of eight nominations and two wins for the 1971 film that also featured Jeff Bridges, Cybill Shepherd, Ellen Burstyn and Ben Johnson, who won the Supporting Academy Award.
Leachman went on to co-star John Milius’ Dillinger (1973) and retouched with Bogdanovich and Shepherd for Daisy Miller (1974). Later that year, Leachman would almost steal the show from a group of thieves in Brooks’s overwhelming parody Young Frankenstein.
His character was delightfully exaggerated – as was the black and white film set in Transylvania, which also starred Gene Hackman, Teri Garr, Marty Feldman and Madeline Kahn. A recurring gag across the gagged photo saw horses often invisible neighing nervously at the mere mention of their name. The film remains among the funniest ever made.
Speaking of “the funniest thing ever,” Leachman in the mid-1970s continued to repeat himself in The Mary Tyler Moore Show. He received Emmy nominations for Best Comedy Series for his first four seasons – losing to Allin the Family twice and M * A * S * H - before winning the 1975-77 consecutive category. In 1974, just before this remarkable series, CBS launched Valerie Harper’s character Rhoda Morgenstern for the sitcom Rhoda.
Leachman appeared in the high-profile wedding episode of Rhoda in 1974, and the program ended in the top 10 year-end among prime time programs in its first two seasons – before Mary Tyler Moore. Follow Rhoda ‘With immediate success, Eye Network created the character of Leachman for the 1975 sitcom Phyllis. Displayed as the lead-out for Rhoda on Monday nights, the new series was also an immediate success, achieving a full season ranking with more Rhoda during 1975-76. But both series were overshadowed by the successful NBC drama Little House on the Prairie, that changed for Monday nights that season. Phyllis wrapped in 1977, and Rhoda left a year later.
Leachman won an Emmy nomination for the first season of Phyllis a year after winning consecutive hardware for the role in Mary Tyler Moore.
She continued to accumulate film and TV credits throughout the 1970s and 80s before earning her second regular role in the series as a replacement for longtime star Charlotte Rae on the successful NBC sitcom The facts of life. Leachman took over the female lead in 1986 for the last two of her nine seasons, playing Beverly Ann Sickle, the chatty sister of Rae’s Edna Garrett.
Leachman followed with the leadership in The Nutt House, a short-lived NBC sitcom, created by Alan Spencer and Brooks, in which she played a double role alongside another colleague High anxiety alum Harvey Korman. The slapstick hoax about a once powerful hotel that had been through hard times lasted only a handful of episodes.
A few seasons later, NBC joined Leachman with another popular star, Stacy Keach, to Walter and Emily, a multi-generation comedy that lasted one season in 1991-92. That season, she also had a unique voice in The Simpsons, and she had a brief but memorable voice in the 1996 feature film Beavis and Butt-head Do America. She played an elderly woman who ran into the boys on the road several times, calling them “Travis and Bob”.
Leachman continued to work at a fast pace in the 1990s – already in his 60s or 70s. She scored another regular role on the series as Ellen DeGeneres’ restless mother on CBS The Ellen Show, which aired in 2001-02. At about the same time, she first appeared as Grandma Ida at Fox’s Malcolm in the middle. The role would last for about a dozen episodes over several seasons, earning her a pair of guest actress Emmys and six nominations in total
MORE TO COME …