Garr, who received an Oscar nomination for her role in ‘Tootsie,’ revealed she had been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 2002.

Teri Garr passed away at the age of 79.

Garr acted widely in film and television, with over 140 credits. She was most famous for her comedic work in such films as   1974’s Young Frankenstein and   1982’s Tootsie, for which she was nominated for an Academy Award. In 2002, Garr revealed that she had been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis.

Garr died Tuesday from the illness “surrounded by family and friends,” publicist Heidi Schaeffer told PEOPLE.

 

Garr was born in Ohio in 1944. Her parents both worked in show business: her father was a vaudeville performer, while her mother was a Rockette who eventually worked in costume production. The family, which also included her two older brothers, moved to New Jersey before settling in Los Angeles. Garr’s father died when she was 11.

 

“She put two kids through school,” Garr told the   Los Angeles Times   of her mother in 2008. “I have a brother who’s a surgeon, and there’s me and my other brother who builds boats. She was a costumer. She was a costumer at the studio. She always said, ‘We’re still alive…’” 

Garr began training as a dancer, with an emphasis on ballet. She dropped out of college to move to New York to focus on acting, where she studied at the Actors Studio and the Lee Strasberg Theatre and Film Institute.

Her early projects allowed her to put her dancing skills to good use. She appeared in six films starring Elvis Presley, including   1964’s Viva Las Vegas  . She also appeared on television variety shows as a dancer.

 

“I got fed up with dancing in the chorus,” she told Roger Ebert in 1980. “I trained for 10 years. At the end I asked myself, ‘Why am I not in the front? I didn’t study all those years to be in the back and not make any money. ’” 

She continued: “But I was shy and sweet. So I started going to the psychiatrist and learned how to talk to people. Directors would say to me, ‘We want you to play a character that is a little less complex than you are.’ Yeah, right. What they meant was, ‘You’re playing a fool.’”

 

Her first speaking role came in The Monkees’ 1968 film   Head.  It was written by Jack Nicholson, whom she had met in acting class. That same year, she appeared in an episode of   Star Trek  , “Assignment: Earth,” which was her first major speaking role. She also became a regular on   The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour   in 1972. 

Soon Garr began to find great success. In 1974, she appeared in Francis Ford Coppola’s thriller   The Conversation  . That same year, she starred in Mel Brooks’ horror comedy   Young Frankenstein   as Inga, Dr. Frankenstein’s assistant, a role she landed with some help from her mother.

“My mother was the costumer for   Young Frankenstein  ,” she told PBS in 2012. “I asked her if they had finished casting and she said she didn’t know.” Garr asked her agent to get her an audition, and after four rounds of auditions, she was chosen. “It was amazing.” Her time on   Sonny & Cher   helped her land the role. “I got the German accent from Cher’s hairdresser,” she revealed. 

 

Three years later, she starred in   Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind  , which allowed her to show off her dramatic chops. Then, in 1982, she starred alongside Dustin Hoffman in Tootsie   .  Film critic Pauline Kael called Garr “the funniest neurotic, befuddled woman on the screen.” She received an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress for the film, but lost to her  Tootsie co-star   Jessica Lange.

Garr’s other major film roles around that time included   1981’s One From the Heart  , 1983’s   Mr. Mom  , 1985   ‘s After Hours ,  and   1992’s Mom and Dad Save the World.  But in a male-dominated comedy world, Garr had to work hard to achieve more depth in her roles; she wasn’t always successful.

“I tried to make the character a little more real,” she told   the Washington Post   in 1983 of her role in   Mr. Mom  . “And I was paralyzed. You don’t have to be too smart in this business to realize that the only way you’re going to get to do something you really want to do is to become a director.”

 

On television, she appeared on such shows as   McCloud  ,   M*A*S*H  ,   The Bob Newhart Show  ,   The Odd Couple  ,   Maude ,   and   Barnaby Jones  . She hosted   Saturday Night Live   three times, in 1980, 1983, and 1985. Garr was a frequent guest on both   The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson   and   Late Night with David Letterman  , although she told Roger Ebert in 1988 that her appearances  on Letterman   , where she often filled in for canceled guests, probably kept her from landing more serious roles.

“The first time I went on Letterman was to promote something, and then I came back as the court jester,” he said. Ebert noted that Garr was one of Letterman’s only guests who could “put a dent in his poise.”

Garr’s later roles included parts in   Casper Meets Wendy  , the Designing Women spin-off series   Women of the House  ,   Dick   , and   Ghost World  . She also appeared in   Friends   as Phoebe’s biological mother.

Garr revealed in 2002 that she had been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis during the 1990s. She began noticing the symptoms while filming   One From the Heart   and   Tootsie  . 

In 2006, she published a memoir,   Speedbumps: Flooring It Through Hollywood  , in which she opened up about her illness. “MS is a sneaky disease,” she wrote in an excerpt published by PEOPLE. “Like some of my boyfriends, it has a tendency to appear at the most inconvenient times and then disappear completely. It would take doctors more than 20 years to figure out what was wrong. Sometimes they would mention MS, but all the tests would come back clear. Then the symptoms would go away and I would forget about it, more or less.”

 

Rumours about her diagnosis before it was made public hurt her career. “Whatever this MS was, the industry wanted nothing to do with it,” she wrote. “At first I was outraged. Whatever was going on in my body had been going on for years. It never interfered with my work. Then I started to think that the job offers disappeared because I sucked as an actress. It was a tough trio: mysterious symptoms, my insecurities about my acting ability and the reality of being an ‘aging’ actress.”

Garr became a national ambassador for the National Multiple Sclerosis Society and national chair of the Society’s Women Against MS program. She limited the number of projects she appeared in and retired from acting in 2011.

“Slowing down is not in my nature, but I have to do it,” she told   Brain & Life magazine   in 2005. “Stress, anxiety and all those things that create a lot of tension are not good for MS.” 

Garr married John O’Neil in 1993. Together they adopted a daughter, Molly. The couple separated in 1996.

She is survived by her daughter Molly O’Neil, 30, and grandson Tyryn, 6.