55 Facts About Mary Tyler Moore

1.

Mary Tyler Moore was an American actress, producer, and social advocate.

2.

Mary Tyler Moore was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance in Ordinary People.

3.

Mary Tyler Moore is known for her supporting role in the musical film Thoroughly Modern Millie.

4.

Mary Tyler Moore was an advocate for animal rights, vegetarianism and diabetes prevention.

5.

Mary Tyler Moore was the oldest of three children; with a younger brother John and a younger sister Elizabeth.

6.

When Mary Tyler Moore was eight years old, the family relocated to Los Angeles, California, at the recommendation of her uncle, an employee of MCA.

7.

Mary Tyler Moore was raised Catholic and attended St Rose of Lima Parochial School in Brooklyn until the third grade.

8.

In Los Angeles, Mary Tyler Moore attended Saint Ambrose School and Immaculate Heart High School in the Los Feliz neighborhood of the city.

9.

Mary Tyler Moore became pregnant while still working as "Happy", and Hotpoint ended her work when it became too difficult to conceal her pregnancy with the elf costume.

10.

Mary Tyler Moore modeled anonymously on the covers of record albums, and auditioned for the role of the elder daughter of Danny Thomas for his long-running TV show, but was turned down.

11.

Mary Tyler Moore's legs appeared in episode three of the third season, but she was cleverly shot above the waist in other episodes with her face at least partially hidden.

12.

In 1961, Mary Tyler Moore appeared in several big parts in movies and on television, including Bourbon Street Beat; 77 Sunset Strip; Surfside 6; Wanted: Dead or Alive with Steve McQueen; Steve Canyon; Hawaiian Eye; Thriller and Lock-Up.

13.

Mary Tyler Moore appeared in a February 1962 episode of Straightaway.

14.

Mary Tyler Moore remembered Moore as "the girl with three names" whom he had turned down earlier.

15.

The Mary Tyler Moore Show was a half-hour newsroom sitcom featuring Ed Asner as her gruff boss Lou Grant.

16.

The Mary Tyler Moore Show bridged aspects of the Women's Movement with mainstream culture by portraying an amiable, independent woman whose life focused on her professional career rather than marriage and family.

17.

Mary Tyler Moore's show proved so popular that three regular characters, Valerie Harper as Rhoda Morgenstern, Cloris Leachman as Phyllis Lindstrom, and Ed Asner as Lou Grant spun off into their own three separate series playing the same characters, albeit with Lou Grant being an hour-long drama instead of a half-hour sitcom.

18.

In seven seasons, the program won 29 Emmys and Mary Tyler Moore won three awards for Best Lead Actress in a sitcom.

19.

Mary Tyler Moore said she asked network to pull the show because she was unhappy with the direction and production.

20.

In 1995, after another lengthy break from TV series work, Mary Tyler Moore was cast as tough, unsympathetic newspaper owner Louise "the Dragon" Felcott on the CBS drama New York News, the third series in which her character was involved in the news media.

21.

Mary Tyler Moore was disappointed with the writing of her character and was negotiating with producers to get out of her contract for the series when it was canceled.

22.

Mary Tyler Moore guest-starred on Ellen DeGeneres's, The Ellen Show, in 2001.

23.

In 2006, Mary Tyler Moore guest-starred as Christine St George, the high-strung host of a fictional TV show, in three episodes of the Fox sitcom That '70s Show.

24.

Moore's scenes were shot on the same sound stage where The Mary Tyler Moore Show was filmed in the 1970s.

25.

Mary Tyler Moore made a guest appearance on the season two premiere of Hot in Cleveland, which starred her former co-star Betty White.

26.

Mary Tyler Moore was the star of a new musical version of Breakfast at Tiffany's in December 1966, but the show, titled Holly Golightly, was a flop that closed in previews before opening on Broadway.

27.

In reviews of performances in Philadelphia and Boston, critics "murdered" the play in which Mary Tyler Moore claimed to be singing with bronchial pneumonia.

28.

Mary Tyler Moore appeared in previews of the Neil Simon play Rose's Dilemma at the off-Broadway Manhattan Theatre Club in December 2003 but quit the production after receiving a critical letter from Simon instructing her to "learn your lines or get out of my play".

29.

Mary Tyler Moore had been using an earpiece on stage to feed her lines to the repeatedly rewritten play.

30.

Mary Tyler Moore made her film debut as a nurse in the Jack Lemmon comedy Operation Mad Ball.

31.

Mary Tyler Moore's first speaking part came in X-15.

32.

Mary Tyler Moore starred opposite Elvis Presley as a nun in Change of Habit.

33.

Mary Tyler Moore returned to the big screen in the coming-of-age drama Ordinary People.

34.

Mary Tyler Moore appeared in only two more films during the next fifteen years: Six Weeks and Just Between Friends.

35.

Mary Tyler Moore appeared in the independent hit Flirting with Disaster.

36.

Mary Tyler Moore was in the television movie Run a Crooked Mile and starred in several television movies including First, You Cry, which brought her an Emmy nomination for portraying NBC correspondent Betty Rollin's struggle with breast cancer.

37.

Mary Tyler Moore starred in Like Mother, Like Son, playing convicted murderer Sante Kimes.

38.

At age 18 in 1955, Mary Tyler Moore married 28-year-old salesman Richard Meeker, and within six weeks she was pregnant with her only child, Richard Carleton Meeker Jr.

39.

Mary Tyler Moore and Tinker announced their separation in 1979 and divorced two years later.

40.

Mary Tyler Moore married 29-year-old cardiologist Robert Levine on November 23,1983, at the Pierre Hotel in New York City.

41.

Mary Tyler Moore struggled with alcohol addiction much of her life but quit drinking and admitted herself into the Betty Ford Center.

42.

In 2014, friends reported that Mary Tyler Moore had heart and kidney problems and was nearly blind from complications related to diabetes.

43.

Mary Tyler Moore died at the age of 80 on January 25,2017, at Greenwich Hospital in Greenwich, Connecticut, from cardiopulmonary arrest complicated by pneumonia after having been placed on a ventilator the week before.

44.

Mary Tyler Moore was interred in Oak Lawn Cemetery in Fairfield, Connecticut in a private ceremony.

45.

Mary Tyler Moore advocated for animal rights for years and supported charities like the ASPCA and Farm Sanctuary.

46.

Mary Tyler Moore helped raise awareness about factory farming methods and promoted more compassionate treatment of farm animals.

47.

Mary Tyler Moore appeared as herself in 1996 on an episode of the Ellen DeGeneres sitcom Ellen.

48.

The storyline of the episode includes Mary Tyler Moore honoring Ellen for trying to save a 65-year-old lobster from being eaten at a seafood restaurant.

49.

Mary Tyler Moore was a co-founder of Broadway Barks, an annual animal adopt-a-thon held in New York City.

50.

Mary Tyler Moore endorsed President Jimmy Carter for re-election in a 1980 campaign television ad.

51.

In 2011, her friend and former co-star Ed Asner said during an interview on The O'Reilly Factor that Mary Tyler Moore "has become much more conservative of late".

52.

Bill O'Reilly, host of that program, stated that Mary Tyler Moore had been a viewer of his show and that her political views had leaned conservative in recent years.

53.

Mary Tyler Moore said she believed that women have an important role in raising children and that she did not believe in Steinem's view that women owe it to themselves to have a career.

54.

In February 1981, Mary Tyler Moore was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress for her role in the drama film Ordinary People but lost to Sissy Spacek for her role in Coal Miner's Daughter.

55.

Mary Tyler Moore was awarded the 2011 Screen Actors Guild's lifetime achievement award.