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Louise Lasser, the actor best known as the star of the Norman Lear sitcom Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman and for her collaborations with her ex-husband Woody Allen, has died. She was 87.
The New York-born actor appeared in several of Allen’s films, including Take the Money and Run and Bananas. Later in her career, she played the elderly artist Beadie in three episodes of Lena Dunham’s hit HBO series Girls.
Her friend Susan Charlotte told The Hollywood Reporter that Lasser died Monday of natural causes at her home in Manhattan.
Lasser was born on April 11, 1939, and studied political science at Brandeis University in Massachusetts before returning to New York to begin her acting career in Greenwich Village. In 1962, she met Allen while on a double date (with different partners) and he cast her in his TV pilot, The Laughmakers, the same year. They began dating and married in 1966.
She appeared in many of Allen’s films in this period, making her movie debut in 1966’s What's Up, Tiger Lily? and continuing to collaborate on 1969’s Take the Money and Run, 1971’s Bananas, and 1972’s Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex* (*But Were Afraid to Ask). They divorced in 1970.
In the early 1970s, Lasser made several guest appearances on television in comedy series, including The Bob Newhart Show and The Mary Tyler Moore Show. Her breakthrough came when she was cast to play the lead character in Lear’s ground-breaking 1976 comedy Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, a satire of soap operas that doubled as a critique of consumerism and ran for over 300 episodes.
After Mary Hartman came to an end, Lasser reunited with Allen for 1980’s Stardust Memories and went on to establish herself as an acclaimed character actor with roles in films such as Todd Solondz’s Happiness (1998), the cult comedy Mystery Men (1999) and Darren Aronofsky’s Requiem for a Dream (2000).
In 2014, she appeared in several episodes of Girls, playing a Manhattan artist. Dunham described Lasser at the time as a “favorite actress of mine,” and said: “She was amazing. She and Jemima (Kirke) had a really funny, strange chemistry. You get to see an older person appreciate Jessa’s character in a way that maybe her friends don’t.”
Lasser stayed in New York her whole life and ran the Louise Lasser Acting Studio on the Upper East Side.
She is survived by her long-term partner, Michael Citriniti.
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