Stage Writes
The Official Stage Rights Blog
How these giants we lost in 2017 made their mark in theater
Let’s salute a few showbiz folks who took their final bows this year. Several were Broadway fixtures, while others found fame on TV or in Hollywood but couldn’t resist the lure of the stage.
Mary Tyler Moore, Roger Moore and Barbara Cook
(Hulton Archive/Getty Images; Everett Collection; Paul Morigi/WireImage)
Mary Tyler Moore, who died in January, had a scarring experience in the 1966 musical Breakfast at Tiffany’s, which closed before it opened, while still in previews. She headed to Los Angeles and became one of TV’s iconic characters, Mary Richards, in The Mary Tyler Moore Show.
Even so, she returned to theater in 1980, as a quadriplegic in Whose Life Is It, Anyway? Though the role was written for a man, Moore said, “It’s important that a play can survive with a woman [in the lead]. Whose Life Is It, Anyway? is not a story about a man. It’s essentially a story about bravery [that] the character never knew she had until she had to call on it.”
Moore received a special Tony for her performance. “I was told they voted it because I was a Hollywood persona who had come to Broadway,” she told The Post. “But I’m not going to look a gift horse in the mouth.”
Click here for the full article published on NYPost.com by Michael Riedel on December 26, 2017.