Obit watch: January 28, 2021.

Cloris Leachman.

…between 1972 and 2011 she was nominated for 22 Primetime Emmys and won eight.

(Of course, she won an Oscar as best supporting actress for “The Last Picture Show”. Interestingly, she beat Ellen Burstyn who was also nominated for the same film.)

A number of those Emmys were for dramatic work, including her performance as a woman who finds herself pregnant at 40 in the made-for-TV movie “A Brand New Life” (1973). But comedy was her forte.
She was nominated four times and won twice for her performance on the hit CBS sitcom “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” as Phyllis Lindstrom, the scatterbrained landlady of Mary Richards, the plucky TV news producer played by Ms. Moore. She went on to play the same role from 1975 to 1977 on the spinoff series “Phyllis,” for which she received another Emmy nomination and won a Golden Globe.

Although her focus for the rest of her career was on television, she also had some memorable movie roles, notably under Mel Brooks’s direction. In his beloved horror spoof “Young Frankenstein” (1974) she was the sinister Transylvanian housekeeper Frau Blücher, the very mention of whose name was enough to terrify any horse within earshot. She played similarly intimidating women in Mr. Brooks’s “High Anxiety” (1977) and “History of the World, Part I” (1981). She also co-starred with Harvey Korman in Mr. Brooks’s short-lived sitcom “The Nutt House” (1989).

And, yes! She did do a “Mannix”! (“The Need of a Friend“, season 2, episode 9.)

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 28th, 2021 at 6:00 am and is filed under 1970s, Mannix, Movies, Obits, TV. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

3 Responses to “Obit watch: January 28, 2021.”

  1. Borepatch says:
    January 28, 2021 at 9:49 pm

    I come here to see who had been on Mannix

    Nicely done.

  2. stainles says:
    January 29, 2021 at 7:36 am

    Well, it is the policy of this blog yadda yadda…

    We actually watched that “Mannix” episode fairly recently. Ms. Leachman was the ex-wife of the guy Mannix was trying to help (played by John “Baltar” Colicos, who showed up quite a bit on “Mannix”).

  3. Jimmy McNulty says:
    January 29, 2021 at 9:41 pm

    Lars was a lucky man.
    And I want some Ovaltine. Brought to my bedside, Frau Blucher!