Actress

Born December 29, 1936;

Died January 25, 2017.

MARY Tyler Moore, who has died aged 80, enjoyed great success on television in the 1960s and 1970s, playing bright, breezy modern women. But the perky image and one of the widest smiles in showbusiness masked personal problems and tragedies, including alcoholism and the death of her only child.

Tyler Moore enjoyed her greatest television success playing producer Mary Richards in the sitcom The Mary Tyler Moore Show (1970-77). Her character challenged sexual stereotypes – although some feminists found her bland. And the show brought Tyler Moore four of her seven Emmy awards.

Despite her personal problems and rather lightweight image, Tyler Moore enjoyed even greater success as a producer in real life than she did playing a producer on screen. Her production company MTM Enterprises not only made her show and several successful spin-offs, but became one of the most powerful independent companies in American TV.

MTM, whose logo poked fun at the MGM logo, with a pussy cat instead of a lion, made Hill Street Blues (1981-87), Remington Steele (1982-87) and St Elsewhere (1982-88). During the 1980s it also branched out into Broadway plays. It was eventually sold off and swallowed up by 20th Century Fox

On the back of her television shows, Tyler Moore starred in more than a dozen films, including Thoroughly Modern Millie (1967) and the Elvis movie Change of Habit (1969). She revealed unexpected depths in Ordinary People (1980), getting an Oscar nomination for her performance as a mother whose elder son has drowned and whose younger son tries to commit suicide..

Donald Sutherland, as the father, struggles to come to terms with his grief, but Tyler Moore’s character simply shuts off her emotions and determines to maintain a façade of normality. Ordinary People won four Academy Awards, including best picture, though Tyler Moore lost out to Sissy Spacek (Coal Miner’s Daughter) for best actress.

Ordinary People was a marked departure from Tyler Moore’s earlier roles and in a bizarre twist there was to be a strange parallel in her own life. Her son Richard shot himself in October 1980, just a few weeks after the film opened. It was initially reported as suicide, though the coroner concluded it was an accident.

Mary Tyler Moore was born in New York City in 1936. Her father was a clerk and she described him as silent, with a “dark side”. Her mother struggled with alcoholism. The family moved to Los Angeles when Moore was eight.

Tyler Moore’s television career began in her teens, playing an elf in adverts for Hotpoint electrical appliances. At 18 she married a cranberry juice salesman nine years her senior and within weeks she was pregnant.

In the late 1950s she secured a regular role as Sam, the woman at the answering service, on Richard Diamond, Private Detective. Sam’s voice was heard and her mouth and legs were shown, but never her face, and she became a minor fantasy figure. But when Moore asked for more money the producers simply got another Sam.

However Tyler Moore’s agents were able to market her as the woman who was Sam. She made one-off appearances in a wide range of series, before landing the part that turned her into a star, that of Laura Petrie on The Dick Van Dyke Show (1961-66).

Much of the humour stemmed from the contrast between the husband, an excitable, television writer, and his calm, efficient wife, who frequently comes to the rescue when things go wrong. The popularity of Tyler Moore’s character forced the writers to expand her role on the show.

Moore’s character was a housewife and mother, but her preference for slacks rather than dresses prompted some debate and boosted sales of women’s trousers. But she most effectively challenged gender stereotypes on The Mary Tyler Moore Show, which advanced the idea of independent professional career women to a huge mainstream audience.

Mary Richards was conceived as a divorcee, but the writers changed her status to spinster, for fear that viewers would think that Tyler Moore had divorced Dick Van Dyke. The premise of a single woman, juggling work and personal life, became a staple of television and in 1998 Entertainment Weekly made The Mary Tyler Moore Show No 1 in its list of the 100 Greatest TV Shows of all time.

Tyler Moore’s first marriage was short-lived. She set up MTM with her second husband producer Grant Tinker. And the characters on The Mary Tyler Moore Show proved a gold mine for it.

Rhoda (1974-78) featured Mary’s friend and neighbour (played by Valeire Harper); Phyllis (1975-77) centred on her landlady (played by Cloris Leachman); and Lou Grant (1977-82), which was drama rather than comedy, starred Ed Asner as the editor, now working for a Los Angeles newspaper.

Tyler Moore broke new ground as a dramatic actress in 1980 in Ordinary People and in the Broadway play Whose Life Is It Anyway?, in which she played a quadriplegic and for which she won a special Tony award.

But further comedy and variety shows on television proved disappointing and her personal problems worsened. Her second marriage ended in divorce and she was treated at the Betty Ford Center for alcoholism. She overcame these alcohol problems and did a lot of work of charity, particularly in the fields of diabetes and animal rights, and she continued to appear intermittently on television and in films.

She married for a third time in 1983, to a cardiologist called Robert Levine, who survives her.

BRIAN PENDREIGH