Mary Tyler Moore, who passed away on January 25th of this year, was an unforgettable television icon. She will be remembered for the strong female leads that she portrayed. Born in Brooklyn, New York in 1936, Mary Tyler Moore started her career on the small screen as the dancing character of “Happy Hotpoint” in appliance commercials. While she appeared briefly in a variety of television shows, her first big role was as Laura Petrie on The Dick Van Dyke Show in 1961.
Although she was eleven years younger than Dick Van Dyke, Mary proved to be a strong comedic partner in the show and also showed off her dancing and singing skills throughout the show’s frequent musical numbers. Van Dyke knew that she was a star, and he revealed to Rolling Stone that, “Mary just picked it up so fast. She had us all laughing after a couple of episodes. She just grabbed onto the character and literally turned us into an improv group.” The show ran for the next five years, ending in 1966. Mary then went on to star alongside actors like Julie Andrews and Elvis Presley in several movies. But, she soon returned to television in 1970 with The Mary Tyler Moore Show.
This new character, Mary Richards, was a single woman living in Minneapolis working as a television producer for a local news station. For the first time on television, Mary was portraying a successful woman who lived in her own apartment and was not consumed by the idea of marriage. Instead, the series focused on the relationship that Mary had with her neighbors and coworkers. Among the many actors who appeared on the show, some of the most notable were women such as Betty White, Cloris Leachman, and Valerie Harper. Mary became an enormous role model for a generation of women looking for something other than life as a housewife.
The Mary Tyler Moore Show was unafraid to take topics such as death, equal pay, and sexism head on, all the while pulling hilarious stunts that made Mary and company even more endearing. According to Jennifer Keishin Armstrong, in her statement to Daily News, the feminist show gave women a chance to be portrayed as women and not as a wife, mother, or side-kick. Behind the camera she was just as powerful, co-producing the show with her then husband, Grant Tinker. Dick Van Dyke commented in his Rolling Stone interview that The Mary Tyler Moore Show, “kicked off an awful lot of enthusiasm in a lot of women.”
Mary also contributed her celebrity and time to some great causes. Suffering from diabetes, she was a spokesperson for the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation. Later, she founded the charity Broadway Barks alongside stage and screen star Bernadette Peters.
Although she is no longer with us, she will be remembered for her wonderful contributions to society. Her talent was undeniable, her smile was unmatched, and, her life was a beacon of light for women everywhere.
Mary, you will be missed!