Louise Lasser, whose pig-tailed braids, bangs and baby-doll dresses took the nation by storm when they became her trademark look on Norman Lear’s Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman in the 1970s, died Monday at her home in Manhattan. She was 87.
Her death was reported by her friend Susan Charlotte to The New York Times.
Initially making her name in early Woody Allen films – the two married in 1966 – Lasser employed a droll, deadpan comic delivery to great effect not only in Allen’s Take the Money and Run, Bananas and Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask), but in buzzy commercials for NyQuil and Excedrin.
Early in her career she even briefly appeared on Broadway in 1962 as Barbra Streisand’s replacement in the musical I Can Get It for You Wholesale, but it wasn’t until January 1976 that Lasser shot to international stardom as the title character in Lear’s wildly offbeat soap opera parody Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman.
As envisioned by Lear, Hartman was not only a soap parody, but an actual soap, televised in syndication five days a week in half-hour installments, in some markets during traditional daytime soap timeslots and in some markets at 11 p.m. Both time periods were telling: The deadpan comedy and satirical bent was fitting in the post-primetime slots, while the faux melodrama of a working class family in small town Ohio (the fictional Fernwood) made for a clever addition to the afternoon sturm und drang that filled network hours.
With each episode opening in what was then the genre’s standard weepy music and static shot of a suburban kitchen, Mary Hartman (the name was repeated in both the show’s title and the audio accompanying the opening credits, with Mary’s mother, played by Dody Goodman, calling for her daughter as if summoning a child home for dinner) mixed everyday tribulations – at least as presented in advertising of the day – like waxy yellow building with domestic issues (impotence, adultery) and horrors of a more newsworthy kind (most notably, a mass murder just down the street from the Hartman residence).
MORE TO COME…