Valerie Harper, who parlayed a sidekick role as the leading lady’s unprepossessing best friend on “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” into a star turn of her own in the hit sitcom “Rhoda,”ied on Friday.he was 80.
The death was confirmed by her daughter,ristinaacciotti. She did not say where Ms. Harper died.
Ms. Harper’s husband, Tony Cacciotti,nnounced on Facebookn July that he had decided not to move Ms. Harper into hospice care, as her doctors had recommended. She had leptomeningeal carcinomatosis, in which cancer cells invade the fluid-filled membrane surrounding the brain.
Ms. Harper was a theater actress, working with some regularity but far from well known, when she auditioned for a new CBS sitcom starrings. Moores Mary Richards, a Minneapolis news producer (well,ssociateews producer) and the embodiment of a newly ascendant American breed — the single working woman.
The part was for her upstairs neighbor, Rhoda Morgenstern, a weight-conscious, self-deprecating, wisecrackingly blunt Jewish expatriate from New York City who would serve as a foil for Ms. Moore’s prim, sweet-tempered, every-hair-in-place and emphatically non-Jewish Mary.
Rhoda, who worked as a window dresser, was painfully envious of Mary’s good looks, her slender figure (though it should be said that she — that is, Ms. Harper — was never terribly overweight), the parade of handsome men who courted her and her classy job.
But Rhoda was also determined to assert herself in their friendship, and with the telltale brass (and accent) of a Noo Yawka, she rarely hesitated to let Mary know when a man was wrong for her, when she was being too nice or when her outfit was off kilter or, worse, predictable: “Who’d ya get that nightie from? Tricia Nixon?”
“Rhoda felt inferior to Mary, Rhoda wished she was Mary, Rhoda looked up to her,” Ms. Harper said in an interview with the Archive of American Television in 2009. “All I could do was, not being as pretty, as thin, as accomplished,as: ‘I’m a New Yorker, and I’m going to straighten this shiksa out.’”
“The Mary Tyler Moore Show” had its premiere in September 1970, and the characters met in the opening moments of that first episode. Mary, moving into a new apartment, encounters Rhoda entering through a window from a ledge. Rhoda had been washing the window, thinking the apartment was going to be hers.
“So you’re, uh, Rhoda?” Mary says.
“Morgenstern, right.”
“And I’m Mary Richards.”
“Hello,” Rhoda says. “Get out of my apartment.”
By the middle of the episode, however, Mary has told Rhoda that she’s a hard person to dislike.
“I know what you mean,” Rhoda responds. “I’m having a hard time hating you too. We’ll both have to work on it.”
The chemistry between the actresses was immediately apparent and infectious, and Ms. Harper became an audience favorite. She won the Emmy Award for best supporting actress in a comedy series three consecutive seasons. The idea of a spinoff show based around Rhoda was said to have surfaced as early as the second season of “Mary Tyler Moore,” grew louder in the third (as Ms. Harper lost weight and Rhoda grew into a more glamorous presence) and became a reality after the fourth.
In “Rhoda,” which made its debut in 1974 and ran until 1978, the character moves back to New York City and, as someone with acknowledged flaws and insecurities, becomes a kind of Everywoman alternative to Mary Richards’s ideal American sweetheart. She re-engages with her family: a sister with a weight and self-esteem problem — a younger version of Rhoda, actually — played by Julie Kavner; Ida, a quintessentially meddling Jewish mother (Nancy Walker); and Martin, the doting papa (Harold Gould). And
she finally lands a husband, Joe Gerard (David Groh).
Their wedding, a special hourlong episode in the middle of the first season, began on the morning of the ceremony, with a thrilled and nervous Rhoda reassuring her sister that a day like this was in her future as well.
“Well, someday it’s going to happen for you, Brenda,” Rhoda says. “You meet a wonderful guy, fall in love, decide to get married and be just as nauseous as I am right now.”
The episode was heavily hyped and heavily watched, a television event on the order of the “Who Shot J.R?” cliffhanger on “Dallas” or the final episode of “Seinfeld.”
The New York Times critic John Leonard, writing under his occasional pseudonym, Cyclops, wrote afterward:
“We have gathered together before, as a nation, in front of the TV set, usually in mourning (after an assassination), sometimes in fear (war seems imminent), occasionally in wonder (setting foot on the moon). But this time we got together as a nation, in anticipation and retrospection, to watch aarriage.
“The ‘we’ cut across class, generational and ethnic lines,” he continued. “A felt need can be inferred and perhaps an affirmation. We may not be sure we know what we want for ourselves, but what we want for other people is a reasonable facsimile of what Rhoda got, and what Joe, her spouse, got, too — love, humor, generosity, commitment.”
Ms. Harper won her fourth Emmy that season, this time for best lead actress in a comedy series. In Season 3, Joe and Rhoda separated, and Rhoda completed the show’s run, through seasons four and five, as she began — single and spunky about it.
Valerie Kathryn Harper was born on Aug. 22, 1939, in Suffern, N.Y., about 32 miles north of New York City. Her father, Howard, was a salesman; her mother, Iva, was a nurse. Her heritage was a European and French Canadian mix. She was not Jewish.
The Harper family moved frequently when Valerie was young — to California, Michigan, Oregon and Jersey City, where she went to high school. Her parents divorced when she was a teenager, and her father’s second wife was an Italian-American woman from the Bronx, who Ms. Harper said was a model for Rhoda.
From an early age she aspired to be a ballet dancer, and, though never the sveltest girl en pointe, at 16 she landed a job in the corps de ballet at Radio City Music Hall.
“I always felt like a klutz next to those other skinny girls, as we twirled our adorable little parasols,” she said in an interview with The New York Times Magazine in 1974.
From there she moved to the theater. She earned chorus-line jobs in the pre-Broadway run of “Li’l Abner,” directed by Michael Kidd, and three Broadway shows, including “Wildcat,” starring Lucille Ball, and “Subways Are for Sleeping,” both also directed by Mr. Kidd.
She also studied acting — John Cassavetes was one of her teachers — and supported herself with odd jobs, including as a hatcheck girl at Lutèce. In 1964, she met and married Richard Schaal, an actor with the Chicago-based Second City troupe, and joined the company herself, learning improvisation techniques from its founder, Paul Sills, and his mother, the acting coachiola Spolin.
In 1970, Ms. Harper was part of the Second City ensemble that appeared on Broadway in判aul Sills’ Story Theater,” comic adaptation of Grimm’s fairy tales laced with improv. The show ran for more than eight months, mostly while Ms. Harper was also taping the first season of “Mary Tyler Moore.” An article about her in The Times began: “The sexiest chick on Broadway has a regular job moonlighting as an overweight spinster on television.”
Ms. Harper’s marriage to Mr. Schaal ended in divorce in 1978. Survivors include her husband, whom she married in 1987, and their daughter.
Ms. Moore diedn 2017 at 80.
After “Rhoda,” Ms. Harper continued to act on television and in the movies. She starred in her own series, “Valerie,” in 1986 and 1987, as the working mother of three sons with an often absent husband. (He was an airline pilot.) After a salary dispute, however, the producers killed off her character in a car accident, replaced her with Sandy Duncan and renamed the series, first “Valerie’s Family” and later “The Hogan Family.” It remained on the air until 1991.
Ms. Harper won a wrongful termination suit against Lorimar Television, the production company, and was awarded compensatory damages variously reported at between $1.4 million and $1.85 million, as well as profit participation in the show.
She acted in many made-for-television films and made numerous guest appearances on series including “Touched by an Angel,” “Sex and the City,” “Melrose Place” and “That ’70s Show.” She also starred in a short-lived sitcom, “City,” set in a city manager’s office. That series was created by Paul Haggis, who would go on to write and direct the Oscar-winning film “Crash.”
Ms. Harper’s film credits include the action comedy “Freebie and the Bean,” with Alan Arkin and James Caan, and Neil Simon’s “Chapter Two,” starring Mr. Caan and Marsha Mason. She played the title role in “Golda’s Balcony,” the screen adaptation of William Gibson’s one-woman play about Golda Meir.
She returned to Broadway a handful of times, including in 2010 in the starring role in Matthew Lombardo’s play “Looped,” about the entertainingly profane, hard-drinking diva Tallulah Bankhead at the end of her career. A memoir, “I, Rhoda,” was published in 2013.
“Rhoda, like most of us, was a victorious loser,” Ms. Harper once said, a sentiment that might easily be applied to herself in her final days. Her illness may have been a metastatic recurrence of lung cancer, which she survived in 2009.
Afterward she spoke often in interviews on television, urging people to take advantage of their lives while they have them.
“I really want Americans, and all of us, to be less afraid of death,” she said.