Robert Redford told critic Leonard Maltin how he came to cast the perky spirited hilarious TV star Mary Tyler Moore as the cold-as-ice mother in Ordinary People:
“I’ve always liked the idea of going off in casting, going off-center. Mary Tyler Moore was America’s sweetheart, you know. The ‘Dick Van Dyke Show’ was fantastic. Really, really, funny, funny show. And she was great. I had a place on the beach in Malibu. I’m sitting on this fall or winter day and there’s nobody on the beach. I’m sitting there looking out at the ocean and suddenly I see this figure walking by. She’s all bundled up and it’s Mary Tyler Moore; she had a place down the beach. When she was walking by, she was all bundled up, all alone and that wasn’t the Mary Tyler Moore I had seen on television. She was deep in thought, thinking something and I thought, “Hmm.” And it stuck in my head. Then years later, I guess that image came back to me. I said, ‘You know, maybe Mary Tyler Moore’ and the studio thought I was nuts. They said, ‘You can’t do that.’ And I said, ‘Well…’ I met with her and she agreed to do it and that was a very brave move on her part.”
I’ll say.
If you only saw her in Ordinary People. you would think she had made a career out of playing stiff repressed women. Her cardigan behavior alone …
In The Mary Tyler Moore Show, which premiered in 1970, she played a woman who struck out on her own, leaving behind an asshole boyfriend, moving to a new city, and starting a life that SHE got to choose, make her own way. She didn’t just have a job. She had a CAREER. Not only was it a pioneering representation of a career woman, even more than that it said something else extremely important, something that shows how far we have backslid since then: Women can carry a TV show. Women can have a show named AFTER them and still dominate the ratings. That show was appointment television. Not just for women. For everyone. It launched MULTIPLE careers.
I don’t even need to WATCH “Chuckles the Clown Bites the Dust” episode to start laughing. I merely THINK about it and start to laugh. Her acting in that scene is world-class.
We have all been her in that moment. I have one particularly horrifying memory of starting to laugh so hard at a solemn event that I actually thought I was going to perish from trying to hold it in. It’s much easier for actors to learn how to shed tears, there are technical things you can do, but to laugh? Laughing is spontaneous, quirky, weird. There are tricks you can do: push your stomach in, like you’re getting punched, and burst out with a HA HA at the same time and keep going with it. That’s pretty fail-safe, the laughter sounds pretty real when you do that. But this? This IS real. I can think of very few “laughing scenes” that are its equal. So much of acting-laughing looks fake. I am in awe of what she pulls off here. AND it makes me howl every time.
I could not put up this post without mentioning Change of Habit, Elvis’ final film, co-starring Mary Tyler Moore. They filmed in 1969, and it was released in 1970. They’re lovely together. He plays an inner city doctor who’s set up a clinic for the community. Because of course. And she plays a nun who is also a nurse, and is sent out of the convent, sans habit, to do good out in the real world. In other words, this is Elvis’ Vatican II movie. She goes to work in Elvis’ clinic. Blasphemous sparks fly. There’s a great scene when she joins up with a neighborhood football game in the park. Watching her and Elvis play football together is a Joy like no other. She joked that she grew up with brothers. She had been playing football since she was a kid. Here is Mary Tyler Moore and Elvis, hanging out during the filming of that scene. And, of course, she had nothing but good things to say about him, because that is true across the board. Her only complaint was that he could not – could NOT – stop from calling her “Ma’am” or “Miss Moore.” She did her best. “Please, Elvis. Call me Mary.” He tried. But it never felt right.
A pioneer. A game-changing woman. A torch-bearer for the rest of us.
RIP.
, the story of that sex scandal, accompanied by funny and beautiful illustrations by Sorel. 
