Louise Lasser dies aged 87
Mary Hartman Mary Hartman star anchored a five-days-a-week cult TV experiment, a career of uneasy comic roles outlasted the 1970s
Images
Louise Lasser in 2014. Photograph: Joseph Marzullo/MediaPunch/Shutterstock
theguardian.com
Louise Lasser as Mary Hartman in 1976. Photograph: John G Zimmerman Archive/Everett/Shutterstock
theguardian.com
Lasser with Woody Allen in Bananas. Photograph: Rollins-Joffe/United Artists/Kobal/Shutterstock
theguardian.com
Actor Louise Lasser has died aged 87, The Guardian reports, citing The New York Times, which said she died at home in Manhattan. Lasser was best known as the lead in the cult 1970s sitcom Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman and for roles in early Woody Allen films.
Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman ran from January 1976 to July 1977 and produced more than 300 episodes over two seasons on a five-days-a-week schedule, an industrial pace that shaped both the show and its star. The series was a soap-opera parody set in suburban Ohio, with Lasser’s Mary—recognisable for her pigtails—obsessing over domestic minutiae while being pulled into increasingly unsettling situations, including bizarre deaths. The Guardian notes the show was intended to explore social change in the US during the 1970s, using the rhythms of daytime melodrama to smuggle in darker material.
Lasser’s screen career began earlier in the New York comedy ecosystem that would also produce Allen’s early films. She had a small role in Take the Money and Run (1969), then larger parts in Bananas (1971) and Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex* (*But Were Afraid to Ask) (1972), according to The Guardian. Her personal life was also entangled with that world: she met Allen on a double date and later married him, a relationship that lasted four years.
Her work did not stay fixed in one era or one genre. The Guardian lists guest appearances across US television including The Bob Newhart Show, The Mary Tyler Moore Show and McCloud, followed by later roles in series such as Taxi, Laverne & Shirley and St Elsewhere. In film, she appeared in Todd Solondz’s Happiness, Mystery Men, and Darren Aronofsky’s Requiem for a Dream, where she played the neighbour of Ellen Burstyn’s character. In 2014 she appeared in Lena Dunham’s Girls as an artist who gives Jemima Kirke’s character a job.
The through-line was a career built less on franchise stardom than on taking parts that depended on a performer’s willingness to look strange, anxious, or unguarded on camera. Mary Hartman’s production schedule alone required an actor who could deliver volume without sanding down the character’s oddness.
Lasser is survived by her long-term partner, actor Michael Citriniti, The Guardian reports.