Teri Garr, the actress and singer who brought her buoyant personality to 'Young Frankenstein' and was Oscar-nominated for 'Tootsie,' has died at 79.
variety.com
Garr explained to the A.V. Club in a viciously frank and feminist 2008 interview why she was often cast as the “long-suffering wife” in films such as “Mr. Mom”: “If there’s ever a woman who’s smart, funny, or witty, people are afraid of that, so they don’t write that. They only write parts for women where they let everything be steamrolled over them, where they let people wipe their feet all over them. Those are the kind of parts I play, and the kind of parts that there are for me in this world. In this life.”
Despite her obvious appeal to great directors, she found many of her encounters in the business to be unbearably sexist, such as being told by “The Sonny and Cher Show” producers that if she wanted to be paid as much as the men, she could quit. “The whole world is sexist, starting with that show. That was an example of it: not getting paid what everybody else got paid for doing the same thing. So I started learning early that women are steamrolled,” she told the A.V. Club.
