Cloris Leachman, whose acting career spanned eight decades, has died of natural causes, age 94.

She was nominated for a Golden Globe for acting in motion pictures, and lost, three years in a row, but won the fourth time, as Best Actress in a Television Series, Comedy or Musical for her lead performance in Phyllis (1975).

‘In third grade, my teacher asked me to read in front of the class,’ Leachman wrote in her memoir, Cloris: My Autobiography (2009). ‘I was so touched because that really was the first acting I had ever done, just reading in front of the class. And I was so amazed with the fulfillment I got from being in front of people.’

Act One: Theater.

Cloris was born on April 30, 1926, in Des Moines, Iowa, the eldest of three daughters, to a middle-class family, owners of a lumber company. As a teenager, she started acting in the town’s Little Theater and on local radio stations. She won a scholarship to study drama at Northwestern University, near Chicago, where she also began competing in beauty pageants: having won the title of Miss Illinois, she then competed in the Miss America pageant in 1946, where, placing in the top 16, she was awarded a scholarship, and chose to study acting under Elia Kazan at the Actors Studio in New York City. (A fellow student was Marlon Brando, who remained a lifelong friend). Kazan directed Leachman in her first Broadway play, Sundown Beach (1948). Next, she was Mary Martin’s understudy in South Pacific, later taking over Martin’s lead singing and dancing role.

Her big break came in 1950, when she was cast in William Inge’s Come Back, Little Sheba. It opened out of town to rave reviews, many singling Leachman out as an exciting newcomer. The play was three weeks from opening on Broadway, when Katharine Hepburn asked Leachman to audition for the role of Celia opposite her Rosalind in The Theater Guild’s staging of As You Like It (1950).

“Should I continue in … a production that promised success and glamour, or should I share the world of the great bard with Her Eminence Katharine Hepburn?” Leachman wrote in her memoir. Without hesitation or regret she chose to go with Hepburn and Shakespeare. The show ran for six months on Broadway, and Leachman owned the town. She won more raves for A Story for Sunday Evening (1950) and appeared on Broadway for the eight months run of the comedy King of Hearts (1954).

Act Two: Movies.

‘I don’t look for roles, for they come to me. Mind you, it’s not like I’m sitting in the middle of the floor with thousands of scripts around me. When work comes up, it’s good. I love it. Work doesn’t feel like work.’ (Cloris)

Broadway success led to calls from Hollywood. Leachman’s mix of dramatic and comedic chops made her a serious contender for the female lead in Charlie Chaplin’s Limelight, but she lost the role to Clair Bloom. The film that eventually featured her movie debut was far removed from Chaplin’s sentimentality, when Robert Aldrich cast her as a sexy, femme fatale hitchhiker in his noir Kiss Me Deadly (1955), one of Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer novels adapted for the screen by the punchy, leftist, and blacklisted A.I. Bezzerides. The Criterion re-issue describes the film as an “atomic adaptation (in which) the good manners of the 1950s are blown to smithereens … Brazen and bleak, (it) is a film noir masterwork as well as an essential piece of cold war paranoia,’ capturing the paranoia of the zeitgeist, an anti-nuclear parable echoing the Pandora’s box legend. ‘This independently produced low budget film was a shining example for the New Wave directors – Truffaut, Godard et al,’ wrote critic Dave Kehr, ‘who found it to be proof positive that commercial film could accommodate the quirkiest and most personal of visions.’ What better film debut for one of the quirkiest actors of her generation, Cloris Leachman?

She appears at the opening, right after the titles that famously run backwards: ‘Deadly… Kiss Me…’ dressed only in a raincoat, hitch-hiking barefoot on a California highway having escaped from a mental asylum. Hammer gives her a ride, and within a couple of scenes, her character, Christine, a woman we have assumed to be the heroine of the film, is tortured (off screen) and brutally killed. Christine’s 10 minutes ride with Mike Hammer is filled with prime noir dialog, which Leachman delivers expertly:

“You have only one real lasting love.”

“Now, who could that be?”

“You. You’re one of those self-indulgent males who thinks about nothing but his clothes, his car, himself. Bet you do push-ups every morning just to keep your belly hard.”

“I should’ve thrown you off that cliff back there. I might still do it. Do you always go around with no clothes on?”

Leachman’s few minutes on screen were enough for her to express a range of qualities: fear, strength, inscrutability, wit, and sensuality. Her last words to Hammer before she dies are, “Remember me.” Both protagonist and audience do. As did Hollywood.

Leachman was already pregnant with the first of her five children during the filming of Kiss Me Deadly and did not relish being away from home on movie locations. She preferred TV work, in a studio close to home. But film directors kept calling. She appeared in two Paul Newman movies, The Rack (1956), and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969).

It was her supporting role in director Peter Bogdanovich‘s The Last Picture Show (1971) that firmly secured her place in Hollywood, earning her a Golden Globe nomination and an Academy Oscar win. Leachman played Ruth Popper, the neglected wife of the local high school gym teacher, who has an affair with one of his high school students, played by Timothy Bottoms.

Leachman showed her comedic, zany other side in three Mel Brooks comedies. In Young Frankenstein (1974), which won her one of her Golden Globe nominations, she was the hideous housekeeper Frau Blucher, whose name caused horses to neigh loudly and rear in fear whenever it was mentioned. She was the demented dominatrix villainess and psychiatric nurse Charlotte Diesel, who worked at the Institute for the Very, Very Nervous in Brooks’ Hitchcock lampoon High Anxiety (1977), and a raucous harridan, Madame Defarge, in History of the World: Part I (1981).

Leachman kept taking small parts in features, moving with age to grandmotherly roles. She appeared in some 40 movies, but her main love and strength was in the more intimate television format.

Act Three: TV

Leachman got her early training in New York, in the 1950s, doing it the hard way, on live television. She was a regular on Charlie Wild, Private Detective (1950-52), and appeared on other series, Gunsmoke, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Suspense and Studio One.

Her first regular series was Lassie (1957-58) in which she played the mother of Timmy (Jon Provost), the dog’s second master (the first being 11-year-old Jeff, played by Tommy Rettig from 1954-1957). She lasted half a season. ‘Cloris did not feel particularly challenged by the role,’ Provost said later. ‘When she realized that all she’d be doing was baking cookies, she wanted out.’ She was replaced by June Lockhart.

She won her first of eight Emmy awards for playing a 40-year-old woman having her first baby in A Brand-New Life (1973). But she became a household name thanks to The Mary Tyler Moore Show (1970-77), in which she played Mary’s egotistical and manipulative landlady, Phyllis Lindstrom. Leachman managed to make audiences love the unsympathetic, irritating woman – so much so, that after 34 episodes, she was spun off to her own series, Phyllis (1975-77). The Hollywood Foreign Press Association loved Phyllis too, and Leachman won the golden statuette in 1976.

She was a regular on other TV series, playing mostly lovable, idiosyncratic characters on sitcoms: in The Facts of Life, as a divorcée who acts as confidante to a group of young women, in The Ellen Show as Ellen DeGeneres’s mother, and as a hard-drinking grandmother from hell in Malcolm in the Middle (2000-06), which won her two more Emmys. She was Maw Maw, the family’s matriarch, in Raising Hope (2010-14), earning her another Emmy nomination.

In all, she was nominated 22 times for prime-time Emmy awards and won eight, making her the most nominated and, along with Julia Louis-Dreyfus, the most awarded actress in Emmy history.

Leachman never stopped working. She last played Mrs. Mandelbaum, a regular on the series Mad About You (1992-2019). Her final movie, High Holiday, a comedy of course, wrapped in 2020 and will be released later this year.

Act Four: A Life Well Lived

In her book, Cloris: My Autobiography, Leachman laid out her optimistic, positive and independent outlook on life.

‘I am from Des Moines, Iowa – not even the city but out in the country. I don’t have a lot of trappings, I think, in my personality. I’m just a simple person with a silly bone … I make fun wherever I go … I always have a great deal of fun being with people. It’s part of the journey … If it is funny, I’ll do anything. I live a very leisurely life. When I do work, it’s not work, it’s great fun and exciting and fresh. I don’t stress at all. When other people say, ‘I’m having a bad day,’ I ask, ‘How can you have a bad day for the entire 24 hours, or even 12 or eight hours?’ Something bad might happen, but that can’t make the entire day bad’.

In 1953, Leachman married Hollywood producer George Englund. They had five children and divorced in 1979. Thirty years later, Englund worked with her to co-write her memoir, Cloris.

Fearless and unconventional, Leachman never stopped or shied from controversy. A vegetarian, she posed nude on the cover of the magazine Alternative Medicine Digest in 1997, body-painted with images of fruit.

An animal rights activist, she also posed for a 2009 PETA poster covered only with strategically placed lettuce leaves. In another PETA ad, promoting “spay and neuter,” she posed opening a condom wrapper with her teeth.

In 2008 she competed on Dancing with the Stars, becoming, at age 82, its oldest contestant. The following year, she was the Grand Marshal for the 2009 New Year’s Day Tournament of Roses Parade and Rose Bowl Game in Pasadena, Calif.

She was an atheist, writing: “Extraordinary miracles, billions and trillions of them, happen all the time, but not because there’s a God … I didn’t say there’s nothing out there, but there certainly isn’t any God.’

Leachman’s longtime manager Juliet Green said:

“There was no one like Cloris. With a single look she had the ability to break your heart or make you laugh ’till the tears ran down your face. You never knew what Cloris was going to say or do and that unpredictable quality was part of her unparalleled magic.”

Cloris Leachman wrote: “I don’t think I’m my age. I’m truly 6 years old.’ She left the stage at 94, still six years old at heart, having never had a bad day.