Actress Mary Tyler Moore dies at age 80

Mary Tyler Moore, who blazed a trail for female comedians on TV, has died, her publicist said today. She was 80.

Moore gained fame in the 1960s in the role of Laura Petrie on The Dick Van Dyke Show. She won two outstanding actress Emmy awards for portraying the energetic former United Service Organizations dancer who married and became a stay-at-home mom.

The show’s creator, Carl Reiner, remembered in 2014 how the 24-year-old Moore impressed him.

“She was a very quick study,” he recalled in 2014. “It didn’t take her very long.”

In the 1970s, Moore created one of TV’s first working female heroines on The Mary Tyler Moore show. She played a single TV producer in her 30s with a quick wit and independent spirit. The series ran seven seasons and won 29 Emmys, a record that stood for a quarter century until Frasier broke it in 2002.

In the 1980 movie Ordinary People, Moore played an affluent, bitter mother who lost a son in an accident. The film won the Oscar for best picture and best director for Robert Redford, and it earned Moore an Oscar nomination and a Golden Globe. That same year, her only child, Richard, who’d had trouble in school and with drugs, fatally shot himself in an accident. He was 24.

Moore lived with juvenile diabetes for some 40 years and told of her struggle in her 2009 book, Growing Up Again. She served as chairwoman of the Juvenile Diabetes Foundation International, supported embryonic stem cell research, and was active in animal rights causes.