Mary Tyler Moore’s most enduring contributions to television are in two classic sitcoms, The Dick Van Dyke Show (1961–66) and The Mary Tyler Moore Show (1970–77), although she has appeared in the medium in a variety of roles both before and after these series. Her first on-camera television work was as a dancer, and it was as “Happy Hotpoint,” a singing and dancing fairy, that she first caught the public eye. Her first regular series role as Sam, the receptionist on Richard Diamond, Private Detective, was notable primarily because it featured only her dancer’s legs and voice.

As Laura Petrie, the beautiful, talented, and not-so-typical suburban housewife married to comedy writer Rob (Dick Van Dyke) on The Dick Van Dyke Show, Moore earned critical praise (and Emmy Awards) as she laid the foundation for the wholesome but spunky identity that would mark her television career. Though she lacked their experience in television comedy, Moore was no mere “straight woman” to comedians Van Dyke, Carl Reiner, Morey Amsterdam, and Rose Marie; she managed to stake out her own comic identity as a lovely and competent housewife who was frequently thrown a curve by her husband’s unusual friends and career. Thanks to the show’s explorations of the Petries’ courtship (they met while he was in the military and she a USO dancer), Moore was able to display on the show her talents as both dancer and singer as well as comedic actor. While The Dick Van Dyke Show stopped production in 1966, it appeared in reruns on the Columbia Broadcasting System’s (CBS’s) daytime lineup until 1969, keeping Moore’s perky persona in the public eye as she sought film roles and stage work for the remainder of the decade.

On the basis of Moore’s popularity in The Dick Van Dyke Show, CBS offered her a 13-episode contract to develop her own series starting in 1970. Moore and her then-husband Grant Tinker, a production executive at 20th Century-Fox at the time, used the opportunity to set up their own production company, MTM Enterprises, to produce the show. Following the success of The Mary Tyler Moore Show, MTM went on to produce a number of the most successful and critically praised series of the 1970s and 1980s, with Moore’s contributions limited mainly to input on her own show(s) and the use of her initials.

On The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Moore played Mary Richards, a 30-something single woman “making it on her own” in 1970s Minneapolis, Minnesota. MTM first pitched her character to CBS as a young divorcée, but CBS executives believed that her role as Laura Petrie was so firmly etched in the public mind that viewers would think that she had divorced Dick Van Dyke (and that the American public would not find a divorced woman likable), so Richards was rewritten as a woman who had moved to the big city after ending a long affair. Richards lands a job working in the news department of fictional WJM-TV, where Moore’s all-American spunk plays off against the gruff boss Lou Grant (Ed Asner), world-weary writer Murray Slaughter (Gavin MacLeod), and pompous anchorman Ted Baxter (Ted Knight). In early seasons, her all-male work environment is counterbalanced by a primarily female home life, where again her character contrasts with her ditzy landlady Phyllis Lindstrom (Cloris Leachman) and her New York–born neighbor and best friend, Rhoda Morgenstern (Valerie Harper). Both the show and Moore were lauded for their realistic portrayal of “new” women in the 1970s whose lives centered on work rather than family and for whom men were colleagues rather than just potential mates. While Mary Richards’s apologetic manner may have undermined some of the messages of the women’s movement, she also put a friendly face on the potentially threatening tenets of feminism, naturalizing some of the decade’s changes in the way women were perceived both at home and at work.

After The Mary Tyler Moore Show ended its seven- year, award-winning run, Moore appeared in several short-running series, including her attempt to revive the musical variety show Mary (1978), which is best remembered for a supporting cast that included the then-unknown David Letterman, Michael Keaton, and Swoosie Kurtz. Moore’s later stage, feature film, and made-for-television movie efforts have represented successful efforts to break with the perky Laura Petrie/Mary Richards persona. In the Academy Award–winning Ordinary People (1980), for example, Moore’s performance contrasts the publicly lovable suburban housewife—a Laura Petrie–type facade— with her character’s private inability to love and nurture her grief-stricken family; in Flirting with Disaster (1996), she steals scenes as Ben Stiller’s vain adoptive mother. Moore won a special Tony Award for her performance as a quadriplegic who wanted to end her existence in Whose Life Is It, Anyway? And on television, she has played everything from a breast cancer survivor in First, You Cry to the troubled Mary Todd Lincoln in Gore Vidal’s Lincoln to a villainous orphanage director in Stolen Babies. Still, Mary Richards continues to define Moore. In 2001 she and Valerie Harper renewed their on-screen friendship in Mary and Rhoda, a made-for-television movie featuring their Mary Tyler Moore Show characters. Originally pitched as a new series, Moore, Harper, and the American Broadcasting Company (ABC) opted out of a longterm commitment despite the show’s high ratings. Another sign of Mary Richards’s enduring appeal came in 2001, when the city of Minneapolis and the cable network TV Land unveiled a bronze statue of “Richards” tossing her famous beret into the air, as Moore did on the opening credits of The Mary Tyler Moore Show. In recent years, Moore has devoted much of her attention to work for the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation, the American Diabetes Association, and various animal rights organizations.