NEW YORK -- Mary Tyler Moore, the star of TV's The Mary Tyler Moore Show, died Wednesday. She was 80.
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Moore gained fame in the 1960s as the frazzled wife Laura Petrie on The Dick Van Dyke Show. In the 1970s, she created one of TV's first career-woman sitcom heroines in The Mary Tyler Moore Show.
"She was an impressive person and a talented person and a beautiful person. A force of nature," said producer, creator and director Carl Reiner, who created The Dick Van Dyke Show. "She'll last forever, as long as there's television. Year after year, we'll see her face in front of us."
Moore won seven Emmy awards over the years and was nominated for an Oscar for her 1980 portrayal of an affluent mother whose son is accidentally killed in Ordinary People.
"Mary's energy, spirit and talent created a new bright spot in the television landscape, and she will be very much missed," Robert Redford, director of Ordinary People, said in a statement. Ellen DeGeneres took to Twitter to say: "Mary Tyler Moore changed the world for all women."
In Moore's first major TV role, she played the young homemaker wife of Dick Van Dyke's character, comedy writer Rob Petrie, from 1961-66.
But it was as Mary Richards, the plucky Minneapolis TV news producer on The Mary Tyler Moore Show, 1970-77, that Moore truly made her mark.
At a time when women's liberation was catching on worldwide, her character depicted an independent career woman.
Richards was comfortable being single in her 30s, and while she dated, she wasn't desperate to get married. She sparred affectionately with her gruff boss, Lou Grant, played by Ed Asner, and addressed him always as "Mr. Grant."
Asner paid tribute to his co-star, saying on Twitter: "A great lady I loved and owe so much has left us. I will miss her. I will never be able to repay her for the blessings that she gave me."
The series ran seven seasons and won 29 Emmys, a record that stood for a quarter-century until Frasier broke it in 2002.
The Mary Tyler Moore Show spawned the spinoffs Rhoda, (1974-78), starring Valerie Harper; Phyllis (1975-77), starring Cloris Leachman; and Lou Grant (1977-82), starring Asner.
The Mary Tyler Moore Show was the first in a series of acclaimed, award-winning shows that Moore produced with her second husband, Grant Tinker, who died in November, through their MTM Enterprises. The Bob Newhart Show, Hill Street Blues, St. Elsewhere and WKRP in Cincinnati are among the MTM series that followed.
Moore won her seventh Emmy in 1993 as a supporting actress in the Lifetime network movie, Stolen Babies. She won two Emmys for The Dick Van Dyke Show and the other four for Mary Tyler Moore. In 2012, Moore received the Screen Actors Guild's lifetime achievement award.
On the big screen, Moore's appearances were less frequent. She was a 1920s flapper in the hit 1967 musical Thoroughly Modern Millie and played a nun who falls for Elvis Presley in Change of Habit in 1969.
She turned to serious drama in 1980's Ordinary People, playing a mother who loses a son in an accident. The film won the Oscar for best picture, and Redford won for best director. It earned Moore an Oscar nomination and a Golden Globe.
In real life, Moore also endured personal tragedy. The same year Ordinary People came out, her only child, Richard, who'd had trouble in school and with drugs, fatally shot himself in an accident at 24. Her younger sister, Elizabeth, died at 21 from a combination of painkillers and alcohol.
Moore lived with juvenile diabetes for some 40 years and told of her struggle in her 2009 book, Growing Up Again. She also spent five weeks at the Betty Ford Clinic in 1984 for treatment of alcohol abuse.
In 1983, Moore married cardiologist Robert Levine, who survives her. Her marriage to Tinker lasted from 1962-81. Before that, she was married to Dick Meeker from 1955-61.
Moore was born in 1936 in Brooklyn, N.Y. Her family moved to California when she was about 8 years old.
In 1992, Moore received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
A Section on 01/26/2017