CLORIS LEACHMAN

        The Mary Tyler Moore show was so popular that there were two spin-off series from it. Both were about the lives of Ms. Moore’s friends. The first was Rhoda (1974-78) with Valerie Harper as the star. The second was Phyllis (1975-77) starring Cloris Leachman. Ms. Leachman was a skinny blonde and not much to look at. But her comic timing and her acting chops put her in way more than 500 movies and TV episodes. She was still acting into her 90's. And she appeared on Dancing With The Stars when she was 82!

Though she had literally hundreds of TV roles, this article is limited to her movie career. And we’ll start with her home run.

The Last Picture Show (1971) is a splendid film that got eight Oscar nominations, including Best Picture. The French Connection won that one, but Ben Johnson won Best Supporting Actor and Cloris Leachman won Best Supporting Actress. Ms Leachman plays Ruth Popper, love-starved wife of the high school basketball coach. She has a one-sided affair with a high school kid and she breaks your heart. The film features many of the teens as they grow up and out of their dusty little Texas town. If you’ve never seen it, waste no time in dialing it up. It is an absolute must see. Texasville (1990) has most of the same actors grown older. They should have left well enough alone.

Mel Brooks, the king of wackiness, made Cloris Leachman a part of his actor stable. And she held her own against the likes of Gene Wilder, Madeline Kahn, Marty Feldman, Peter Boyle et al. Her first Brooks effort is as Frau Blucher in Young Frankenstein (1974). She is the housekeeper at the Transylvania castle of the first Dr. Frakenstein. Gene Wilder portrays his great-grandson who has inherited the castle but want nothing to do with the monster stuff. Too bad! 

High Anxiety (1977) is a spoof of Hitchcock films that works intermittently.  Ms. Leachman plays Nurse Diesel, one of the staff of a very questionable mental hospital. .Ms. Leachman is pleasantly nutty as one of the nuts. 

Cloris Leachman is featured in another Brooks outing, A History of the World part 1 (1981), as Madame Defarge. Her character, an inn keeper, plots the French Revolution with her patrons. Despite the title, there is no sequel to this often funny, often not, Brooks effort. It’s worthwhile for the good parts. A trailer promises Part 2, which never happened, which would have included Hitler on Ice and Jews In Space.

Irene Ryan played Granny in the hit TV series, The Beverly Hillbillies. When they decided to make it a movie, in 1993,  Ms. Ryan had gone to that big mansion in the sky. Into the breach steps Cloris Leachman, who does a creditable job in a pretty bad movie. 

Never Too Late (1996) is nothing like the other films with this title that are about people having babies late in life. This one is about a crooked senior adult home director and the residents’ somewhat convoluted plots to try to catch him. Cloris Leachman is one of the residents, as is Olympia Dukakis. Advertised as an entertainment for old folks, it is exactly that. I’m one of them. 

You can also catch Ms. Leachman in a bit part in Spanglish (2004) and The Women (2008). 

All of the films in this article are available on DVD. All are for adults.