Best Known As: Rhoda on TV's Mary Tyler Moore Show
Valerie Harper is best known for playing upstairs neighbor Rhoda Morgenstern on the 1970s sitcom The Mary Tyler Moore Show. She played the same character in the spinoff series Rhoda (1975-78). She has also made many appearances in on- and off-Broadway theater. In 2001 she ran for president of the Screen Actors Guild (SAG), facing fellow actress Melissa Gilbert.
Harper went to New York's Hunter College, the alma mater of actor Vin Diesel.
Career Highlights: Blame It on Rio, Chapter Two, Golda's Balcony
First Major Screen Credit: The Mary Tyler Moore Show: Season 01 (1970)
Biography
Actress Valerie Harper's fame largely rests on her colorful portrayal of television's "New Yawk-er" Rhoda Morgenstern. After growing up in Oregon, Michigan and Jersey City, Harper became a chorus dancer in the Big Apple, hoofing with the Radio City Rockettes and performing in such Broadway musicals as Li'l Abner, Take Me Along, Wildcat and Subways Are for Sleeping. Her first film appearance was in the 1959 movie adaptation of Li'l Abner. While spending her nights on stage, she attended Hunter College and the New School for Social Research, supporting herself between dancing gigs as a telephone canvasser and hat-check girl. During the 1960s, she did comedy-improv work with Second City and Paul Sill's Story Theatre (one of her co-workers during her Sills years was her first husband, comic actor Richard Schaal). In the popular mid-1960s comedy record album When You're in Love, the Whole World is Jewish, Harper can be heard offering an embryonic version of Rhoda Morgenstern, a character she based on her childhood friend Penny Almog. So well-grounded was she in Rhoda-like characterizations by 1970 that she was hired for The Mary Tyler Moore Show (her first regular TV-series gig) on the basis of a one-sentence audition. After winning three Emmies for her Mary Tyler Moore work, Harper was spun off into her own series in 1974, titled Rhoda. Though it opened to excellent ratings (thanks largely to the one-hour episode in which Rhoda married her blue-collar fiance Joe [David Groh]), Rhoda was never as big a hit as Mary Tyler Moore, and it left the air in 1978. During this period, Harper made her formal film debut in Freebie and the Bean (1974), earning a Golden Globe nomination for her portrayal of a Puerto Rican housewife. After toting up several stage and TV-movie credits, she returned to the weekly-series grind in 1986 with Valerie. She walked out on the show over a salary dispute, whereupon the producers fired her and retooled the series into The Hogan Family, which ran without Harper until 1991. She has starred in two series since leaving Valerie (1990's City and 1995's The Office) but has been unable to latch onto a character with the staying power of Rhoda Morgenstern. Extremely active in prosocial causes off-camera, Valerie Harper was co-founder of an anti-hunger organization called LIFE (Love Is Feeding Everyone). ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
Harper was born in Suffern, New York at Good Samaritan Hospital in Rockland County, New York, to a mixed Catholic/Lutheran family.[citation needed] Her mother, Iva (née McConnell), was a nurse, and her father, Howard Harper, was a sales executive.[1] She was reared in Oregon. She has been married to Tony Cacciotti since 1987.
Career
Harper began as a dancer/chorus girl on Broadway in the late 1950s and early 1960s in such shows such as Take Me Along and Subways Are For Sleeping, as well as Wildcat, in which she performed with Lucille Ball. She can be seen as an extra in rock-and-roll promo films that featured such artists as "Frankie Lymon and The Teenagers". In 2001, she returned to the Broadway stage to replace Linda Lavin in The Tale of the Allergist's Wife.
She also appeared in bit parts in several films beginning with Li'l Abner (1959), when she was a teenager. During the late 1960s, however, Harper worked somewhat less, though she appeared in Carl Reiner's play Something Different in 1968. She also wrote an episode of Love, American Style[which?] with her then-husband, actor/writer, Richard Schaal, whose daughter, actress Wendy Schaal (who voices "Francine Smith" on American Dad), was her stepdaughter.
Things changed when Harper got the role of the wise-cracking yet vulnerable uber-Jewish New Yorker, Rhoda Morgenstern, on the landmark CBS 1970 TV sitcom The Mary Tyler Moore Show. She was a series regular from 1970-74, then starred in her own spin-off series Rhoda from 1974-78. Both series were ratings hits and she won four Emmy awards and a Golden Globe for her work as Rhoda Morgenstern throughout this period.
She was also nominated for a Golden Globe for "New Star of the Year" for her role in 1974's Freebie and The Bean.[2] Harper was one of the first people to guest star on The Muppet Show in its first season.
Some years later, Harper returned to situation comedy when she played family matriarch Valerie Hogan on the 1986 series Valerie. However, following a salary dispute with the production company Lorimar in 1987, Harper was fired from the series. She later successfully sued Lorimar for breach of contract, though the series continued without her. In 1987, it was initially renamed Valerie's Family and then The Hogan Family, as Harper was replaced by actress Sandy Duncan who played her sister-in-law Sandy Hogan. The series ended in 1991.
Harper is a member of the Screen Actors Guild and ran for president in the 2001 election, losing to Melissa Gilbert. She currently serves on the national board of directors of SAG.[3]
A 2000 project, Mary and Rhoda, was planned as a reunion series for Harper and her friend and longtime co-star, Mary Tyler Moore, but the project instead appeared as a made-for-TV movie on the ABC network.
In 2007, Harper portrayed Golda Meir in a national tour of the one-woman Broadway drama Golda's Balcony. She also released a film version of the show.
She played Tallulah Bankhead in the world-premiere production of Matthew Lombardo's "Looped" at the Pasadena Playhouse in California[4] in 2008, and is doing so at Arena Stage[5] in Washington, DC, in 2009.
The 1st season of "Rhoda" (September 1974 - March 1975) was released on DVD on April 21, 2009 by Shout! Factory.
