But she could act, her performance as the lascivious but innocent Inga showcasing her gift for verbal and visual gags. It was Tootsie, however, that enabled her to demonstrate her true range.
Her character, Sandy, is a stressed-out, unsuccessful actress who finds herself routinely rejected for acting parts – and eventually by her boyfriend Michael (Dustin Hoffman) who contrives to steal a soap opera role for which she has been turned down by masquerading as a woman.
In one scene, Teri Garr’s character bids a cheerfully desperate farewell to a friend: “It was a wonderful party, my date left with someone else, I had a lot of fun, do you have any Seconal?”
“A lot of it was improvised,” she told a Boston Globe interviewer. “Like my character’s speech of exasperation: ‘I never said, I love you; I don’t care about I love you. I read The Second Sex. I read The Cinderella Complex. I’m responsible for my own orgasm! I don’t care!’ It’s really about a girl being mad at the way the world is changing.”
Tootsie won Oscar nominations including for Best Picture, Best Director and Best Actor (for Hoffman). But in an example of life reflecting art, Teri Garr lost the supporting actress Oscar to Jessica Lange, who played an actress with whom Hoffman becomes infatuated. She admitted to being terribly disappointed but, typically, took it on the chin: “I was the girl who’d danced in Elvis movies,” she wrote. “I’d been buried in sand for an Annette Funicello movie. Was I really going to win an Academy Award?”
She was born Terry Ann Garr in Lakewood, Ohio, on December 11 1944 (she changed her name to Teri after a numerology expert told her that it was unlucky to have double letters in both her first and last names). Her mother, Phyllis Lind, a hosiery model known as “Legs”, had been one of the original high-kicking Rockettes at New York’s Radio City Music Hall. Her father, Eddie, was a struggling vaudeville comedian.