Cloris Leachman: Oscar winner whose career spanned seven decades

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Cloris Leachman was the award-winning actor and comedian best known for her roles as Phyllis Lindstrom inThe Mary Tyler Moore Show on television and as Ruth Popper in Bogdanovic’s movie The Last Picture Show.

Leachman, who has died aged 94, enjoyed a career on small screen and silver screen spanning some seven decades, in a wide variety of memorable roles that defied typecasting. “There was no one like Cloris. With a single look she had the ability to break your heart or make you laugh till the tears ran down your face,” said her manager, Juliet Green. “What I think is fun is to bring comedy to serious things, and bring serious things to comedy,” Leachman once noted.

Cloris Leachman was born in 1926 in Des Moines, Iowa, to Cloris and Berkeley Leachman, who worked at the family-owned Leachman Lumber Company. She was educated at Illinois State University and Northwestern University, majoring in drama. Her showbusiness debut came in 1946 on winning the Miss Chicago beauty contest. Although she did not go on to win Miss America, a runner’s up prize of a $1,000 scholarship allowed her to study under the renowned director Elia Kazan, at the Actors Studio in New York.

Kazan taught the technique invented by Konstantin Stanislavski in the early 1900s and now known as “method acting”, encouraging actors to immerse themselves entirely in a part, inhabiting fully the role of a character. Method acting would have a profound influence on Leachman, who developed and employed the technique throughout her acting career.

“I didn’t learn anything by the book, it was all improv,” she said of the teaching, “Before [the group] I thought that acting was to be natural and be charming and that’s all it was.”

Her film debut was as an uncredited extra in Carnegie Hall (1947), a movie about the New York concert venue, directed by Edgar G Ulmer. On Broadway, she first appeared in Sundown Beach (1948), directed by Kazan. The Fifties brought many television roles including in Lassie (1957-58) as Ruth Martin, adoptive mother of Timmy Martin on the Miller family farm.

Leachman rose to fame starring as the nosy and overbearing landlady, Phyllis Lindstrom, in The Mary Tyler Moore Show, which ran from 1970 for seven years on CBS and was later shown on Channel 4 in the UK. She was nominated five times for an Emmy Award for the role, whose popularity with audiences engendered a spinoff, Phyllis, that ran from 1975 to 1977.

Interviewed at the time, she said: “Basically I don’t care how I look, ugly or beautiful. I don’t think that’s what beauty is. On a single day, any of us is ugly or beautiful. I’m heartbroken I can’t be the witch in The Wizard Of Oz. But I’d also like to be the good witch. Phyllis combines them both.”

At the peak of her career Leachman was chosen by director Peter Bogdanovich to play Ruth Popper in The Last Picture Show (1971), a coming-of-age drama film which saw both critical and commercial success. Her performance, as the depressed middle-aged wife of a high-school coach, won her an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress.

When interviewed by Johnny Carson in 1978, she was asked about what motivated her. She replied: “I do feel that people create their own opportunities. I don’t think they’re lying out there on the ground and you go and find one, you pick it up. What you are and what you’ve done creates opportunities that maybe weren’t even there at all ... because if you’re not ready you won’t even recognise it.”

In addition to her Oscar for The Last Picture Show, she was the winner of a record nine Emmy Awards for acting. Leachman had continued working in her nineties, living in Encinitas, California.

A committed vegetarian since the 1950s, Leachman had used her Hollywood fame to campaign for animal rights, including against the captivity of orcas at SeaWorld and for the abolition of the use of animals in circuses.

Leachman was married to George Englund from 1953 to 1979, with whom she had five children.

Cloris Leachman, actor, born 30 April 1926, died 27 January 2021