Being Mary Tyler Moore Was Harder Than Portraying Mary Richards

“So devastated to hear about Mary Tyler Moore”. Instead, she wore slacks around the house – capris and their ankle-length version, cigarette trousers, paired with stylish flats – and wanted to wear them on the show. In both The Dick Van Dyke Show and The Mary Tyler Moore Show – and the whole story is epitomized just in that progression of titles – Moore was proud, feisty, loving but not simpering, and subtly but insanely amusing. She had a son who died in his 20s, lost a sister to drugs, and a brother to cancer.

Her influence on TV and American womanhood was huge – even though the women she played on TV weren’t.

The same Mary Tyler Moore I spent my lonely high school years with along with Rhoda on the groundbreaking TV sitcom, The Mary Tyler Moore show. It wasn’t that she didn’t want one. By the end of the episode, they’ve accepted her into their fold: “You were jailed for doing your job?” “Instead, we found ourselves and we found ourselves to be friends”.

Mary Tyler Moore helped add an entirely new dimension to television, movies, and almost every other aspect of life.

Without Mary Richards, there’d have been no “Murphy Brown”, no “Designing Women”, no other comedies set up around single and powerful women living their life without excuses, all setting an example for young women in the workplace to go after their goals. It’s there in 30 Rock, in Friends and in Sex And The City.

I talked to Rachel Bloom, the star and co-creator of the CW’s Crazy Ex-Girlfriend.

It has been said her smile delighted audiences, and that is true enough.

Reinforcing the trail blazed by Katharine Hepburn and Lucille Ball, Moore showed the world of entertainment that women could wear trousers just as good or better than a man.

“I moved to Minneapolis sight unseen in 1985 because of the [Mary Tyler Moore] show”, he said. Four years later, Moore returned to television with a series that took less than 10 minutes to make an impression that would last a lifetime. “Mary Tyler Moore” was a critical hit, earning the Emmy Award for Outstanding Comedy Series three years (1975-77), as well as Moore being named Outstanding Lead Actress in a Comedy Series three years (1973-74, ’76).

Copyright 2017 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/. Here’s our pop culture correspondent Linda Holmes.

“Today, “sadness is all around” for all of us and I will miss Mary. deeply”. She was THE BEST! By the time Moore chose to end the series in 1977, the show had won 29 Emmys, a record that would not be broken until Frasier went one better in 2002.

Mary Tyler Moore’s death this week brought a jolt of disbelief as well as dismay.

“She’s the reason I became an attorney and went into a man’s world and said ‘I can do this if she can do that, ‘” said one woman.

” And she was able to keep who she was and still show that she could be a woman and be successful”.

The show ran until 1977 and spawned spinoffs (“Rhoda” and “Lou Grant”) and copycat shows.

JENNIFER KEISHIN ARMSTRONG: They tried several times. Although one time was really more of a sighting. I mean, it’s sort of touching. She’s also constantly expected to listen to the travails of middle-aged white men enraged about what they don’t have.

Laura didn’t have a career or a life outside of her family but she wasn’t terrifyingly ideal and she wasn’t a clownish caricature. “Mary had America facing such issues as equal pay, birth control and sexual independence way back in the ’70s”.

BILL QUINN: (As Walter Richards) I won’t.

Richards did have spunk, perhaps only matched by Moore’s own.

As I got older I began to understand that Mary Tyler Moore had her own production company and that by most accounts, a third of the writers on that show were women.