Popular American TV actress Mary Tyler Moore dies at 80

Emmy-award winning American television actress Mary Tyler Moore has died at the age of 80.

Prominent American actress Mary Tyler Moore, whose performances on two top-rated television shows in the 1960s and ’70s, died Wednesday in a Greenwich hospital in Connecticut, after years of battling hardships from brain tumors to diabetes.

“Today, beloved icon, Mary Tyler Moore, passed away at the age of 80 in the company of friends and her loving husband of over 33 years, Dr. S. Robert Levine,” Mara Buxbaum, Moore’s representative, said in a statement.

Her death was caused by cardiopulmonary arrest after she had contracted pneumonia.

In 2012, the six-time Emmy Award winner had elective surgery to remove what is known as a meningioma, or benign tumor of the lining tissue of her brain.

Over the length of her acting career, Moore helped define the new vision for American womanhood by representing a main character with an independent spirit.

She starred on the critically successful series ‘The Dick Van Dyke Show’ (1961-66) and ‘The Mary Tyler Moore Show’ (1970-77), going on to earn an Oscar nod for her role in the Academy Award-winning film by Robert Redford, ‘Ordinary People’ (1980).

The American actress starred opposite Dick Van Dyke as suburban stay-at-home mom, Laura Petrie, from 1961-66, then played Mary Richards — a hard-luck loser in love who moves across the state to Minneapolis and gets a job at local TV station — from 1970-77.

In her role for the film ‘Ordinary People’, Redford’s directorial debut, Moore played a frighteningly cold suburban mother who can't forgive her teenage son for living after his brother (her favorite son) dies.

She also appeared in other successful films, including ‘X-15’ (1961), ‘Change of Habit’ (1969) opposite Elvis Presley, and ‘Six Weeks’ (1982).

AI/AI