Television icon Mary Tyler Moore has died at the age of 80.Tributes are coming in from all over the world to a woman who made her name in the worlds of entertainment, fashion and beyond. NY1's Neil Rosen takes a closer look at her life and career.
"Who can turn the world on with her smile?"
As her famed TV show theme proclaimed, Mary Tyler Moore did indeed turn the world on with her smile. Her groundbreaking 1970s TV series, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, where she portrayed an independent, working woman, earned a record breaking 29 Emmy awards.
In the 1960s, she played the unforgettable Laura Petrie on The Dick Van Dyke Show, another landmark program that broke the mold.
Moore was born in 1936 in Brooklyn Heights, and began her professional career as a dancer.
But her big break came as a comedic actress when she was only 24-years-old in The Dick Van Dyke show, one of the most highly regarded comedy series in the history of television. Created by Carl Reiner, it was a look at the professional and domestic life of Rob Petrie, the head writer for a fictional TV variety show. Moore played wife, Laura Petrie and showed a great flair for comedy, popularized capri pants, and during the show's five seasons, walked away with two Emmys.
When that show ended in the late sixties, she starred in a handful of unmemorable movies and was even cast as a nun in Elvis Presley's last film "Change of Habit."
She returned to TV in 1970 with The Mary Tyler Moore Show, a half hour game-changing comedy where she portrayed Mary Richards, a single woman, working in a TV newsroom in Minneapolis. It was one of the first programs to show a happy, independent, single woman, living on her own and trying to have a successful career.
It was loved by millions, embraced by the women's movement and was a TV fixture for seven years, earning Moore an additional three personal Emmys. The show and its several spinoffs were produced by Moore's company MTM. which was founded by her and husband at the time Grant Tinker.
Other notable roles included a rare dramatic turn in the 1980 movie Ordinary People which earned her an Oscar nomination and the 1996 comedy Flirting With Disaster. She won another Emmy for the TV movie Stolen Babies, and received a Tony Award for the 1980 Broadway revival of "Whose Life Is It Anyway?"
Her personal life had its fair share of troubles as she battled alcoholism and was a lifelong sufferer of diabetes. She was actively involved with the Juvenile Diabetes Foundation, was a longtime animal rights activist and was inducted, in 1986, into the Television Hall Of Fame.
Mary Tyler Moore was, in every sense of the word, a TV legend.
Mary Tyler Moore was 80 years old.