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Cloris Leachman, Oscar Winner and TV Comedy Star, Is Dead at 94

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Loved her career...especially for her role in "Young Frankenstein"! :thumbsup:



By Robert Berkvist - 27 Jan 2021 - NY Times - Award Season

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“The Last Picture Show” made her a star, but she may be best remembered for drawing laughs on “Mary Tyler Moore,” “Phyllis” and “Malcolm in the Middle.”

The actress Cloris Leachman in 1974. She won accolades and an Academy Award for her dramatic work, but comedy

was her forte.
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Cloris Leachman, who won an Academy Award for her portrayal of a neglected housewife in the stark drama “The Last Picture Show” but who was probably best known for getting laughs, notably in three Mel Brooks movies and on television comedies like “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” and “Malcolm in the Middle,” died on Wednesday at her home in Encinitas, Calif. She was 94.

The death was confirmed by her son Morgan Englund, who did not give a cause.

Ms. 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 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. She was already a seasoned stage and television actress by then, and throughout the rest of the 1950s and the ’60s she appeared in big roles on the small screen — she preceded June Lockhart as the mother in the 1957-58 season of “Lassie” — and small roles on the big screen, including as a prostitute in “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” (1969).

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Ms. Leachman as a lonely housewife and Timothy Bottoms as a high school football player with whom she has a brief affair in “The Last Picture Show” (1971). The performance won her the Oscar for best supporting actress.
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But she did not become a star until 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".

Read More: Cloris Leachman passes at 94yrs

She will be missied and may she Rest in Peace & God Bless Her and Keep Her!

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“I’m at a point where I’m free to go out and have a little fun with my career". Cloris Leachman
 
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I still recall with fondness her turn as Charlie Harper's aged but elegant neighbor, who takes up with his brother Alan, in Two and a Half Men.

Alan (relating how Cloris's character came on to him): "She was like an animal. A great one!"

Charlie (regarding the old woman's age): "she called her first husband 'hun' -- because he was one! . . . Her graduation picture is on a cave wall in France. . . ."

Cloris never stopped working and trying new things.
 
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