Mary Tyler Moore, a television, film, and stage actress and a Hollywood fixture for decades, has died.
Moore was born in Brooklyn, New York, then moved with her family to Los Angeles as a child. She started her career as a dancer in television commercials, then branched out into acting, eventually getting her own sitcom.
The eponymous Mary Tyler Moore Show, which about a woman working in a television newsroom in Minneapolis, was hugely popular, and despite the fact that it was a comedy was one of the first television shows to depict working women in a serious light. As The Atlantic reported in 2013:
The Mary Tyler Moore Show, which Armstrong calls "TV's first truly female-dominated sitcom," first aired in 1970. America was in the middle of the women's rights movement; The Feminine Mystique, released in 1963, urged women to envision work outside the home, touching a nerve for housewives. The Pill became available to all women, regardless of martial status, in 1972. And more and more women were earning degrees and setting off to find jobs.
Still, workplaces were dominated by men.
So when Mary Tyler Moore's character Mary Richards, single and 30, moved to Minneapolis and started working as associate producer at the WJM-TV, she did something that no female character on television had done before. The creators James L. Brooks and Allan Burns originally pitched Mary as a recent divorcée, but the research department at CBS wouldn't have it. "America audiences won't tolerate divorce in a series' lead any more than they will tolerate Jews, people with mustaches, and people who live in New York." So Brooks and Burns compromised—Mary would be coming out of a long relationship with a man she supported through medical school.
She also remained active throughout her life in stage and film, eventually winning a Life Achievement Award from the Screen Actor's Guild in 2011:
Moore had one child, a son named Richard Meeker. He accidentally shot and killed himself in 1980, when he was 24 years old:
Richard Meeker, Mary's only child, was 24, employed by CBS-TV and living with a pair of college coeds when he killed himself with a shotgun with which one of his housemates said he was 'playing, loading and unloading.'
During part of his mother's successful TV career and her marriage to producer Grant Tinker, Richard lived in Fresno, Calif., with his father. He attended public school in Fresno for at least two years.
According to stepfather Tinker, 'Richard was a happy, well-adjusted kid.'
Moore was in her early thirties when she was diagnosed with the diabetes with which she would struggle for the rest of her life. She later became a strong advocate for research into and awareness of Type 1 Diabetes.
Moore had been on a respirator for more than a week before she died. She was 80.