Tootsie, Young Frankenstein, and Friends actor Teri Garr dies at 79

The biggest names in Hollywood have hailed the comic talents of Academy Award-nominated actress Teri Garr.

Best known for such films as Young Frankenstein, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Tootsie and Mr Mom, Garr was known to younger audiences for her recurring role on Friends as Phoebe’s (Lisa Kudrow) estranged mother.

Her publicist and friend Heidi Schaeffer announced Garr’s death today due to complications from multiple sclerosis, She was 79.

In 2002 Garr disclosed that she had been diagnosed with MS after experiencing symptoms for some two decades. In 2007, she underwent surgery for a brain aneurysm.

After roles on TV shows such as Star Trek and Batman, Garr was cast by Mel Brooks as a German lab assistant in the 1974 film Young Frankenstein.

“Her humour and lively spirit made the Young Frankenstein set a pleasure to work on,” Brooks wrote.

“Her ‘German’ accent had us all in stitches! She will be greatly missed.”

Michael Keaton, who starred with Garr in Mr Mom, also paid tribute.

“Forget about how great she was as an actress and comedienne. She was a wonderful woman,” Keaton said on Instagram, adding “go back and watch her comedic work - man, was she great!!”

“Loved her so much,” comedian Steve Martin wrote above a photo of Garr.

Dustin Hoffman said his co-star in Tootsie, for which she was nominated for the Best Supporting Actress Oscar, as unique.

“Teri was brilliant and singular in all she did, and had a heart of gold,” Hoffman, 87, said in a statement to The New York Post. “Working with her was one of the great highs. There was no one like her.”

Outside of comedy, Garr also had memorable drama roles. For Close Encounters of the Third Kind, she played the wife of a man obsessed with UFOs (Richard Dreyfuss) in the Steven Spielberg science-fiction classic.

Garr said her sense of humour had helped her persevere through health challenges.

“It’s absolutely critical,” she said. “A sense of humour and attitude is the most important thing in everything.”

Teri Ann Garr was born on December 11, 1944 in the Cleveland suburb of Lakewood, Ohio, to show-business parents: Her father, Eddie, was a vaudeville performer and actor who appeared on Broadway and her mother, Phyllis, had been a Rockette.

After attending college in Los Angeles, Garr moved to New York City to pursue a career in ballet and then in acting, studying at the famed Actors Studio in Manhattan.

Some of her earliest credits included work as a background dancer in Elvis Presley’s Viva Las Vegas.

Legendary film critic for The New Yorker Pauline Kael once described Garr as “perhaps the funniest, most neurotic dizzy dame on the screen.”

Comedian and actress Tina Fey said: “There was a time when Teri Garr was in everything. She was adorable, but also very real. Her body was real, her teeth were real, and you thought that she could be your friend.”