Teri Garr, the alternately shy and sassy blond actress whose little-girl voice, deadpan comic timing, expressive eyes and cinematic bravery in the face of seemingly crazy male characters made her a star of 1970s and ’80s movies and earned her an Oscar nomination for her role in “Tootsie,” died on Tuesday at her home in Los Angeles. She was 79.
Her publicist, Heidi Schaeffer, said the cause was complications of multiple sclerosis.
Ms. Garr received that diagnosis in 1999, after 16 years of symptoms and medical research, and made her condition public in 2002. In late 2006, she had a ruptured brain aneurysm and was in a coma for several days, but was able to regain her ability to speak.
Onscreen, Ms. Garr’s outstanding features were her eyes, which could seem simultaneously pained, baffled, sympathetic, vulnerable, intrigued and determined, whether she was registering a grand new discovery or holding back tears. If her best-known roles had a common thread, it was the erratic behavior of the men in her characters’ lives.
In “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” she initially went into denial when her husband (Richard Dreyfuss) became obsessed with U.F.O.s, but promptly abandoned him, taking the children, when he built a mountain of garbage, fencing and backyard soil in their family room. In “Oh, God!,” she was supportive when her husband (John Denver), a California supermarket manager, told everyone he was hanging out with God incarnate (George Burns). In “Tootsie,” for which she earned a 1983 Academy Award nomination for best supporting actress, she whined eloquently as the neglected friend-turned-lover of an actor (Dustin Hoffman) who was behaving strangely. It turned out he had been posing as a woman to get better acting jobs.
In “Young Frankenstein,” in which she played a dim, cleavage-proud German lab assistant, her character was involved with a mad scientist (Gene Wilder). As a dive-bar waitress in “After Hours” (1985), she flirted with a man (Griffin Dunne) on the verge of a breakdown.
Ms. Garr’s role in “Mr. Mom” (1983) was an exception. Her character was the one who got carried away, becoming an overconfident ad-agency workaholic while her unemployed husband (Michael Keaton) stayed home with the children and the laundry.
A complete obituary will be published shortly.
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