Actress Cloris Leachman, Who Played Both Silly And Serious, Dies At 94

January 27, 20215:54 PM ET

Cloris Leachman, pictured in 1974, seemed game for anything, from playing a creepy housekeeper in Mel Brooks' Young Frankenstein to competing on ABC's Dancing With the Stars.

George Brich/AP

Actress Cloris Leachman portrayed women of wit and sass over a seven-decade career. She won an Oscar and nine Emmys, and her career was relentlessly inventive. The actress died Wednesday in Encinitas, Calif., of natural causes, according to her press representative, Monique Moss. She was 94.

Leachman was born April 30, 1926, in Des Moines, Iowa. By the age of 11 she was working with the Des Moines Playhouse, and at 17 she had a radio show in which she gave style advice to women. After college, it was off to New York and the Actors Studio. She met and married the Hollywood impresario George Englund, and they had five children together.

Leachman (center) may be best remembered for playing kooky landlady Phyllis Lindstrom on The Mary Tyler Moore Show. Here, she appears in a scene with Mary Tyler Moore (left) and Valerie Harper.

AP

When her children were still young, Leachman worked tirelessly on the stage, on TV and in film. She may be best remembered for playing Phyllis Lindstrom, the kooky, nosy landlady on The Mary Tyler Moore Show. At 45, she gave a wrenching, Oscar-winning performance in 1971's The Last Picture Show. Her character was Ruth Popper, a married woman having an affair with a high school senior in a dying Texas town. In 2009, Leachman told Fresh Air's Terry Gross about that film's dramatic final scene in which Ruth's lover returns after ditching her. She said the scene almost didn't make it into the movie — the producer wanted to cut it out altogether, but director Peter Bogdanovich put up a fight. "He insisted and fought for and kept my scene in, and that's of course why I won the Oscar," Leachman said of her best supporting actress award.