Valerie Harper, ‘Rhoda’ in Hit ’70s Television Shows, Dies at 80

(Bloomberg) -- Valerie Harper, whose work on “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” earned a spinoff program for her character, the outspoken New Yorker Rhoda Morgenstern, has died. She was 80.

Harper, who turned 80 just over a week ago, died Friday morning after battling cancer, her husband Tony Cacciotti said through their daughter Cristina’s Twitter account. People magazine reported in March 2013 that Harper, who overcame lung cancer in 2009, had been diagnosed with terminal brain cancer.

“I don’t think of dying,” Harper said, according to the magazine. “I think of being here now.”

With a background in dance and theater, Harper struck gold quickly after giving television a try, landing the role of the neurotic upstairs neighbor and best friend of Mary Tyler Moore on her CBS-TV situation comedy. Moore died in 2017.

Her death drew tributes from all generations of Hollywood, from Beth Behrs, who recalled their screen time in “2 Broke Girls,” to Ed Asner, who played the character Lou Grant in “The Mary Tyler Moore Show.”

Moore’s Mary Richards became a defining television character of the 1970s, a plucky woman who leaves behind a failed romance to conquer single life and a male-dominated workplace as a producer at a television station in Minneapolis. Harper’s acerbic Morgenstern, bohemian-chic in her head wraps, struggled with more prosaic worries such as her weight.

“Rhoda was, like most of us, a victorious loser,” Harper said in a 2009 interview with the Archive of American Television. “She thought of herself as a loser but she kept at the game, she kept in the game of life, fully.”

Creating Rhoda

Protestant-raised and Catholic-educated, Harper said her character’s New York-Jewish mannerisms and speaking style were based on her stepmother, an Italian-American from East Harlem, and on a Jewish dancer friend from Brooklyn.

Rhoda “would say things in a New York, brash, no-edit way that’s funny, and I think that was part of her charm,” Harper said. “I liked her a lot, and I loved playing her.”

Harper won an Emmy Award for best supporting actress in 1971, 1972 and 1973 and was nominated again in 1974.

She kept up her winning ways after her spinoff, “Rhoda,” joined the CBS lineup in 1974. She won the Emmy for outstanding lead actress in a comedy in 1975 and was nominated in 1976, 1977 and 1978.

The series had Harper’s Morgenstern return to New York City from Minneapolis and fall in love with a divorced father, Joe Gerard, played by David Groh, who died in 2008. Rhoda and Joe married in one of the most-watched episodes in television history, only to separate and divorce toward the end of the show’s five-year run.

‘Valerie’ Lawsuit

Another Harper-centered sitcom, “Valerie,” debuted on NBC-TV in 1986. Harper left the series after the second season due to a contract dispute and was replaced by Sandy Duncan. In 1988, a jury in Los Angeles found Lorimar Telepictures Corp. had wrongfully fired Harper and awarded her and her husband, a producer on the show, $1.85 million in damages plus 12.5% of profits from the 1987-1988 season.

After the verdict, according to the Los Angeles Times, Harper said her victory showed that actors shouldn’t “enter into gentlemen’s agreements with people who are not gentlemen.”

Valerie Kathryn Harper was born on Aug. 22, 1939, in Suffern, New York, one of three children of Howard Harper, a lighting salesman, and the former Iva McConnell, a nurse. For her father’s job, the family moved every few years, from Massachusetts to New Jersey to California to Michigan to Oregon and then back to New Jersey, where Harper attended Lincoln High School in Jersey City.

Ballet, Broadway

She studied ballet and finished her high school degree in New York City, danced at Radio City Music Hall and on Broadway in shows including “Take Me Along,” with Jackie Gleason, and “Wildcat,” with Lucille Ball.

She married fellow actor Richard Schaal and, with his daughter from an earlier marriage, Wendy Schaal, moved to Los Angeles to find work in movies and television. Ethel Winant, head of casting for CBS, saw her perform in a play and asked her to try out for the role of Rhoda on “The Mary Tyler Moore Show.”

In 2010, Harper was nominated for a Tony Award for her portrayal of the actress and Southern tigress Tallulah Bankhead in “Looped.”

She and Schaal divorced in 1978. In 1987, she married producer Cacciotti, and they adopted their daughter, Cristina.

Cacciotti said on Harper’s Facebook page last month that he couldn’t put her in hospice care, going against the advice of doctors, because of more than four decades of “shared commitment to each other.”

To contact the reporter on this story: Laurence Arnold in Washington at larnold4@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Crayton Harrison at tharrison5@bloomberg.net, Steven Gittelson, Linus Chua

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