by Nathaniel R
Emmy & Golden Globe winner Valerie Harper, who rose to considerable fame as Rhoda on The Mary Tyler Moore Show and its spin-off Rhoda, passed away yesterday after a long battle with brain cancer which doctors thought would end her life years ago. And it wasn't her first such battle either. She'd survived lung cancer in 2009, returning triumphantly to showbiz with a smashing performance as Tallulah Bankhead in the play "Looped" in 2010. Though The Mary Tyler Moore Show and Rhoda were before our time as showbiz conoisseurs we did catch her in Looped on Broadway and were thrilled to see her justly Tony-nominated for what was surely a taxing but also a bewitching performance...
Looped numbers among one of our favourite sub-genres in storytelling wherein a playwright or screenwriter or novelist takes on a seemingly tiny incident and builds a whole exciting narrative around it. Looped centered around a looping session from 1965 in which a drunk Tallulah Bankhead needed eight hours to rerecord a single line of dialogue (!!!) from her final feature film Die! Die! My Darling! That was one of of the many grande dame guignol pictures that cropped up in the wake of Baby Jane's blockbuster success in 1962
In addition to her Tony nomination for Tallulah and four Emmy wins as Rhoda, Harper probably came close to an Oscar nomination once. She was Golden Globe nominated for her supporting role in the Neil Simon/Marsha Mason picture Chapter Two (1979). At the Oscars that year the Academy passed on Globe nominees Kathleen Beller and Valerie Harper to make room for Barbara Barrie and Mariel Hemingway in the Supporting Actress category)
with Marsha Mason in "Chapter Two"
Other key roles outside of Rhoda and Bankhead included Consuelo in Freebie and the Bean (1974), and the title character on the sitcom Valerie (1986-1987) and taking over for the Tony nominated Tovah Feldshuh in the national tour of Broadway's Golda's Balcony in 2005/2006.
Are you old enough to have known and loved "Rhoda" on TV? Did you see her in Chapter Two or Looped? If so do share your Valerie Harper memories in the comments.