Somewhere in your memory, a young woman in a long coat is still spinning on a Minneapolis street corner and flinging her tam into the winter sky while Sonny Curtis sings “Love Is All Around.” That opening was shot at South 7th Street and Nicollet Mall in front of the old Donaldson’s department store, and it promised that a single woman on her own was going to make it after all. From September 19, 1970, to March 19, 1977, The Mary Tyler Moore Show made good on that promise across seven seasons and 168 episodes on CBS.
Mary Richards went to work as an associate producer in the shabby WJM-TV newsroom, and creators James L. Brooks and Allan Burns filled it with a gruff boss, a wisecracking writer, and the vainest anchorman in the Twin Cities. Upstairs lived a best friend from the Bronx and a landlady who never stopped meddling. The show won 29 Emmy Awards and spun off Rhoda, Phyllis, and Lou Grant. Nearly five decades after the newsroom gang said goodbye in “The Last Show,” only a few faces from that world are still with us.
Is Mary Tyler Moore still alive?
Mary Tyler Moore had already won Emmys as Laura Petrie on The Dick Van Dyke Show when she and her husband Grant Tinker formed MTM Enterprises in 1969 to make her new series. The famous hat toss was far less glamorous than it looked. “It was freezing cold,” she remembered on Fresh Air, and she admitted, “We didn’t know what we were doing.” After the show ended, she earned an Academy Award nomination for Ordinary People in 1980, and she spent decades as international chairman of JDRF after her own type 1 diabetes diagnosis at 33.
Moore died on January 25, 2017, at Greenwich Hospital in Connecticut, at 80. Her death certificate listed cardiopulmonary arrest, with aspiration pneumonia and diabetes among the contributing causes, as ET reported. Her longtime representative, Mara Buxbaum, told NPR that she “will be remembered as a fearless visionary who turned the world on with her smile.” The man who once growled at her about spunk outlived her by four years.
Is Ed Asner still alive?
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Ed Asner’s Lou Grant was the boss who told Mary she had spunk and then made it clear he did not mean it as a compliment. Asner always insisted Lou was fibbing. “This is a stinking lie, because I love spunk,” he told Al Roker on TODAY in 2017, as NBC News recalled. He carried Lou into a one-hour drama, Lou Grant, from 1977 to 1982, which made him one of the rare actors to play the same character in a comedy and a drama. He won seven Emmys, five of them as Lou, and a new generation came to know his voice as Carl Fredricksen in Pixar’s Up.
Asner died of natural causes at his Tarzana home on August 29, 2021, at 91. “Words cannot express the sadness we feel,” his family wrote, closing their message with “Goodnight dad. We love you.” His son Matt has kept that memory alive, and on the fifth anniversary he shared a heart-wrenching tribute to his father. Across Lou’s office, the newswriter’s desk belonged to a man who had actually auditioned for Lou’s job.
Is Gavin MacLeod still alive?
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Gavin MacLeod was brought in to read for Lou Grant, but he could not picture himself bossing Mary around. He told the producers, “I really like the part of Murray,” according to the Television Academy, and Murray Slaughter became the newsroom’s sharpest wit and Ted Baxter’s most reliable critic. A few months after the finale, MacLeod put on a white uniform as Captain Merrill Stubing on The Love Boat, and he later became a global ambassador for Princess Cruises.
MacLeod died on May 29, 2021, at his home in Palm Desert, California, at 90. His nephew, Mark See, confirmed the news to Variety, and no cause of death was made public. For seven seasons, Murray wrote the news, and the anchorman reading it was another story altogether.
Is Ted Knight still alive?
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Ted Knight was born Tadeusz Wladyslaw Konopka in Terryville, Connecticut, and he left high school to serve in the Army in World War II, where he earned five campaign stars. As the pompous, empty-headed anchor Ted Baxter, he won two Emmys. Later he starred in Too Close for Comfort and played Judge Smails in Caddyshack.
Knight died at his Pacific Palisades home on August 26, 1986, at 62, from complications of cancer diagnosed about a year earlier, UPI reported. Grant Tinker said that he “really loved Ted Baxter and Ted Knight altogether,” and added, “They gave so many of us so many great laughs.” Upstairs from Mary, there was another friend who gave her plenty of laughs.
Is Valerie Harper still alive?
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Valerie Harper started out as a dancer at Radio City Music Hall, and as Rhoda Morgenstern, she was Mary’s best friend who said what everyone else was thinking. The role earned her four Emmys and a Golden Globe and led to Rhoda, which ran from 1974 to 1978. When she was diagnosed in 2013 with leptomeningeal carcinomatosis, a rare cancer in the lining of the brain, doctors gave her months. “I’m going to fight this. I’m going to see a way,” she said, as Fox News recounted.
She kept her word for six more years. Harper died in Los Angeles on August 30, 2019, at 80, after years of fighting cancer, her husband Tony Cacciotti and daughter Cristina said. Rhoda’s sparring partner in the building was the landlady who never knocked.
Is Cloris Leachman still alive?
Cloris Leachman played Phyllis Lindstrom, the self-absorbed landlady, and won an Academy Award for The Last Picture Show during the show’s run. She took Phyllis to her own series in 1975, made audiences howl as Frau Blücher in Young Frankenstein, and won another Emmy in 2006 as Grandma Ida on Malcolm in the Middle. At 82, she was the oldest contestant Dancing with the Stars had seen at the time.
Leachman died at her home in Encinitas, California, on January 27, 2021, at 94. Her death certificate listed a stroke, with COVID-19 a contributing condition, as ET reported. “There was no one like Cloris,” her manager Juliet Green told FOX 11. “With a single look she had the ability to break your heart or make you laugh ’till the tears ran down your face.” When Phyllis left for her own show, a sugary new menace was already cooking in the WJM kitchen.
Is Betty White still alive?
Betty White arrived in season four as Sue Ann Nivens, WJM’s sugary homemaking hostess with a man-hungry streak, and she won back-to-back Emmys for the role in 1975 and 1976. She went on to play Rose Nylund on The Golden Girls and Elka on Hot in Cleveland, and at 88 she hosted Saturday Night Live. Joyce Bulifant told Fox News that White “was always so kind, not just to me, but to everyone she met.”
White died in her sleep at her Brentwood home on December 31, 2021, at 99, less than three weeks before her 100th birthday. Her agent, Jeff Witjas, said she died of natural causes, adding, “Even though Betty was about to be 100, I thought she would live forever.” Sue Ann’s opposite in every way was the sweet-voiced woman who somehow fell for Ted.
Is Georgia Engel still alive?
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Georgia Engel joined in 1972 as Georgette Franklin, the gentle girlfriend who eventually married Ted Baxter. That soft, breathy voice was really hers. “What you see is what you get,” Betty White said of her in 2012, as PBS NewsHour recalled. Engel earned five Emmy nominations in all, three of them as Robert’s mother-in-law on Everybody Loves Raymond, and she charmed Broadway in The Drowsy Chaperone.
Engel died in Princeton, New Jersey, on April 12, 2019, at 70. Her friend and executor John Quilty said the cause was unknown because she was a Christian Scientist who did not see doctors. Before Ted had Georgette, he had a weatherman who could outshine him on camera.
Is John Amos still alive?
John Amos played WJM weatherman Gordy Howard from 1970 to 1973, his first major television role. He went on to play James Evans on Good Times and earned an Emmy nomination as the adult Kunta Kinte in Roots. Moviegoers remember him as Cleo McDowell, the proud owner of McDowell’s in Coming to America.
Amos died of congestive heart failure at a Los Angeles-area hospital on August 21, 2024, at 84. The news did not come out until October 1, when his son Kelly said in a statement shared with USA TODAY, “It is with heartfelt sadness that I share with you that my father has transitioned.” Another familiar face from those years became famous far beyond Minneapolis as Rhoda’s mother.
Is Nancy Walker still alive?
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Nancy Walker made Ida Morgenstern one of the most memorable mothers on 1970s television, first on The Mary Tyler Moore Show and then as a regular on Rhoda. At the same time, she played the housekeeper Mildred on McMillan & Wife, and for two decades she was Rosie, the diner waitress selling Bounty as “the quicker picker-upper.” She also stepped behind the camera to direct episodes of The Mary Tyler Moore Show and Rhoda.
Walker died at her Los Angeles home on March 25, 1992, at 69, after a recurrence of lung cancer first found in 1982, her daughter Miranda told UPI. She had kept working on True Colors until her illness forced her to miss an episode. “Tonight there is a little less laughter in the world,” producer Michael Weithorn said. Every one of the show’s main stars is gone now, and the familiar faces still with us joined the show as part of someone else’s family.
Is Robbie Rist still alive?
Yes. Robbie Rist played David, the little boy Ted and Georgette adopted, from 1975 to 1977, not long after his run as Cousin Oliver in the final season of The Brady Bunch. Born April 4, 1964, he is 62, and he never really stopped working. He voiced Michelangelo in the live-action Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles films and Choji in the English dubs of Naruto. He also plays drums in the rock band Your Favorite Trainwreck and co-created music for the Sharknado films.
Rist is still a fixture on the fan convention circuit, too. In August 2026, he sat on a TMNT panel at Fan Expo Chicago with Judith Hoag and Brian Tochi. The other survivor from that newsroom family spent six seasons as Murray’s wife.
Is Joyce Bulifant still alive?
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Yes, and she is still telling stories. Joyce Bulifant was born December 16, 1937, in Newport News, Virginia, so she is 88 and will turn 89 this December. She played Marie Slaughter, Murray’s patient wife, from 1971 through the final season. Her fondest memory from the show had nothing to do with the set. When the producers called about a table read, she told Fox News in 2018, “I’m in the labor room giving birth. That’s my fondest memory.”
Just this month she opened up on the Katchy Klassics podcast about losing the role of Carol Brady days before filming, a story People picked up and we covered in how she lost the starring role at the last minute. She wrote frankly about four of her marriages in her 2017 memoir, My Four Hollywood Husbands. “I had two children, and I had a little house, and I knew something else would come along,” she said of that heartbreak. More than half a century later, the woman who kept Murray Slaughter’s home life steady sounds entirely at peace with the road she took. “I’m so grateful for so many things,” she said.
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