Cloris Leachman left her mark on comedy

LOS ANGELES • American actress Cloris Leachman, who won an Academy Award for her portrayal of a neglected housewife in the stark drama The Last Picture Show (1971), died on Wednesday at the age of 94.

Leachman (photo) was probably best known for getting laughs, notably in three Mel Brooks movies and on television comedies like The Mary Tyler Moore Show (1970 to 1977) and Malcolm In The Middle (2000 to 2006).

Her publicist said in a statement that the actress died of natural causes at her home in Encinitas, California.

Leachman entered the spotlight as a Miss America contestant in 1946 and was still in the public eye more than 74 years later, portraying offbeat grandmothers on television and film and competing with celebrities less than half her age on Dancing With The Stars in 2008.

In between, she won admiring reviews for her stage, film and television work, as well as Emmy Awards for performances in both dramas and comedies.

Her movie career began in 1955 when she played a doomed hitchhiker in Kiss Me Deadly, a hard-boiled detective film based on a novel by Mickey Spillane.

But she did not become a star until director Peter Bogdanovich cast her in The Last Picture Show, his 1971 adaptation of Larry McMurtry's novel about life in a small Texas town in the early 1950s.

Her nakedly emotional portrait of a lonely middle-aged woman who has a brief affair with a high school football player won her the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress.

"I'm at a point where I'm free to go out and have a little fun with my career," she said after winning.

"Some Oscar winners have dropped out of sight as if they were standing on a trapdoor. Others picked it up and ran with it. I'm going to run with it."

She did, and more awards and acclaim quickly followed. She never received another Oscar nomination, but between 1972 and 2011 she was nominated for 22 Primetime Emmys and won eight.

A number of those Emmys were for dramatic work, including her performance as a woman who finds herself pregnant at 40 in the made-for-TV movie A Brand New Life (1973). But comedy was her forte.

She was nominated four times and won twice for her performance on the hit CBS sitcom The Mary Tyler Moore Show as Phyllis Lindstrom, the scatterbrained landlady of Mary Richards, the plucky TV news producer played by actress Mary Tyler Moore.

Leachman went on to play the same role from 1975 to 1977 on the spin-off series Phyllis, for which she received another Emmy nomination and won a Golden Globe.

Although her focus for the rest of her career was on television, she also had some memorable movie roles, notably under director Mel Brooks' direction.

In his beloved horror spoof Young Frankenstein (1974), she was the sinister Transylvanian housekeeper Frau Blucher. She played similarly intimidating women in Brooks' High Anxiety (1977) and History Of The World, Part I (1981).

Leachman and director-producer George Englund married in 1953 and divorced in 1979. They had five children.

NYTIMES, REUTERS