Actress Mary Tyler Moore died at the age of 80 in Greenwich, Connecticut from complications stemming from pneumonia. Moore had battled adult onset diabetes for decades and in 2011 she had undergone elective brain surgery to remove a benign meningioma.
While Moore had several notable silver screen roles, including an Academy Award nominated performance in the drama Ordinary People (1981), she is best remembered as an actor for starring in two extremely successful television situation comedies, The Dick Van Dyke Show (1961-1966) and the eponymous Mary Tyler Moore Show (1970-1977).
Moore and her husband Grant Tinker ran a production company which spawned many successful television series, such as the Mary Tyler Moore Show and its spin offs Rhoda, Lou Grant, Phyllis along with The Bob Newhart Show and WKRP in Cincinnati. The Mary Tyler Moore show depicted a thirty something news writer working in a television newsroom in Minneapolis, Minnesota. At the time, it was daring to feature a career woman trying to make it on her own. The opening credits famously finished with an exhuberant Moore tossing her tam in the air in a crosswalk, as a valedictory gesture that "you're going to make it after all".
The iconic sequence was immortalized in bronze by TV Land in 2002 as street art near a shopping center. The statute is currently on location at a Visitors Center in Minneapolis while the sidewalks are being repaired.
In honor of Ms. Moore's passing, it is right to figuratively toss our tams and fondly remember one who turned the world on with her smile and know that she made it after all.
No comments:
Post a Comment