Cloris Leachman, who won an Academy Award for her portrayal of a neglected housewife in the stark drama “The Last Picture Show” but who was probably best known for getting laughs, notably in three Mel Brooks movies and on television comedies like “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” and “Malcolm in the Middle,” died on Wednesday at her home in Encinitas, Calif. She was 94.
The death was confirmed by her son Morgan Englund, who did not give a cause.
Like this content? Subscribe here:
https://www.youtube.com/factsverse?sub_confirmation=1
Or, watch more videos here:
Ms. Leachman entered the spotlight as a Miss America contestant in 1946 and was still in the public eye more than 74 years later, portraying offbeat grandmothers on television and film and competing with celebrities less than half her age on “Dancing With the Stars.” In between, she won admiring reviews for her stage, film and television work, as well as Emmy Awards for performances in both dramas and comedies.
Her movie career began in 1955 when she played a doomed hitchhiker in “Kiss Me Deadly,” a hard-boiled detective film based on a novel by Mickey Spillane. She was already a seasoned stage and television actress by then, and throughout the rest of the 1950s and the ’60s she appeared in big roles on the small screen — she preceded June Lockhart as the mother in the 1957-58 season of “Lassie” — and small roles on the big screen, including as a prostitute in “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” (1969).
But she did not become a star until Peter Bogdanovich cast her in “The Last Picture Show,” his 1971 adaptation of Larry McMurtry’s novel about life in a small Texas town in the early 1950s. Her nakedly emotional portrait of a lonely middle-aged woman who has a brief affair with a high school football player won her the Oscar for best supporting actress.
She was nominated four times and won twice for her performance on the hit CBS sitcom “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” as Phyllis Lindstrom, the scatterbrained landlady of Mary Richards, the plucky TV news producer played by Ms. Moore. She went on to play the same role from 1975 to 1977 on the spinoff series “Phyllis,” for which she received another Emmy nomination and won a Golden Globe.
Although her focus for the rest of her career was on television, she also had some memorable movie roles, notably under Mel Brooks’s direction. In his beloved horror spoof “Young Frankenstein” (1974) she was the sinister Transylvanian housekeeper Frau Blücher, the very mention of whose name was enough to terrify any horse within earshot. She played similarly intimidating women in Mr. Brooks’s “High Anxiety” (1977) and “History of the World, Part I” (1981). She also co-starred with Harvey Korman in Mr. Brooks’s short-lived sitcom “The Nutt House” (1989).
Ms. Leachman worked with Mr. Bogdanovich again in “Daisy Miller” (1974), as the mother of the title character (Cybill Shepherd), and in “Texasville” (1990), a sequel to “The Last Picture Show,” in which she reprised her Oscar-winning role.
Cloris Leachman was born on April 30, 1926, in Des Moines to Berkeley and Cloris (Wallace) Leachman. Her father worked at his family’s lumber company. She began acting in children’s theater when she was 7 (her younger sister would also become an actress, under the name Claiborne Cary) and went on to study drama at Northwestern University, which would award her an honorary degree in 2014.
In 2010, a year before she was inducted into the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences Hall of Fame, she began touring the country with a one-woman show — titled, like her 2009 memoir, simply “Cloris” — and making occasional appearances, as yet another grandmother, on the Fox sitcom “Raising Hope.”
She became a full-time member of the “Raising Hope” cast in the 2011-12 season. Her billing in the opening credits paid tongue-in-cheek tribute to her longevity: “ … and introducing Cloris Leachman as Maw Maw.”
Original Author: Produced by Facts Verse and published on 29/01/2021 Source