Mary Tyler Moore began leading The Mary Tyler Moore Show in 1970, not long after her starring role on The Dick Van Dyke Show. The show was produced by her company, MTM Enterprises, which was behind many successful TV series.
Her TV alter ego, Mary Richards, was not that different from the real Moore. “I never went the actors’ studio route. I’m not an actress who can create a character. I play me. I’m scared that if I tamper with it I might ruin it,” she told PEOPLE in 1974. Her single girl character happened, in part, because she didn’t want to play married again, and CBS didn’t want her character to be divorced.
She ended up with eight Emmy nominations and four wins for her work on the series.
After The Mary Tyler Moore Show ended in 1977, the actress moved to New York City, where she found success on Broadway in shows like Whose Life Is It Anyway? (for which she won a special Tony) and Noises Off. MTM Enterprises also produced the Tony-winning revival Joe Egg.
In 1981, she received an Oscar nomination for her role in Ordinary People. She also won a Golden Globe for the performance.
Moore was first married at age 18 to producer Richard Meeker. The couple wed in 1955 and welcomed son Richie the next year, but divorced in 1961. In 1962, she married her second husband, Grant Tinker; they divorced in 1981. During their marriage, after a miscarriage, she learned she was diabetic. Moore also struggled with alcoholism.
In the fall of 1980, Moore’s son Richie died in a gun accident. He was 24.
Then, in 1982, Moore was visiting her mother in the hospital when she met Dr. Robert Levine. They wed in 1983. He was 18 years her junior.
Levine encouraged Moore to go to rehab at the Betty Ford Center. She remained sober for the rest of her life and spoke publicly about diabetes and alcoholism. The couple also founded the Mary Tyler Moore Vision Initiative to prevent diabetic retinal disease, something that she ultimately suffered from.
Moore later appeared on episodes of The Ellen Show, That ‘70s Show and Hot in Cleveland.
In 1995, she published a memoir, After All, in which she dived into her past. She told PEOPLE at the time, “To be able to write about these things now opens up chambers that aren’t well-lit otherwise.”
Moore died in 2017. She was 80. Levine told PEOPLE in 2023 that he still watched The Mary Tyler Moore Show to remember his wife. “I cry. I laugh,” he said. “I’m just bowled over by how extraordinary she was.”
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Ed Asner as Lou Grant
Ed Asner played producer Lou Grant on the series, and the essence of his character came through in the show’s very first episode when he told Mary Richards, “You got spunk … I hate spunk.”
Asner won three Emmys for the show, plus another for the 1976 miniseries Rich Man, Poor Man and his role in the 1977 seminal series Roots. Then in 1978, he led his own Mary Tyler Moore Show spinoff, titled Lou Grant, which saw the character lead a Los Angeles newspaper. He won two more Emmys for the show, which ran from 1977 to 1982, and he held the record for most Emmy wins for a man.
The series provided a steadiness he otherwise struggled to find, he told PEOPLE in 1978. “For the first time I don’t have to run to the phone every 15 minutes to see if I still have a career,” he said. “Professionally, I’m in the catbird seat.” He remained good friends with his Mary Tyler Moore castmates.
Asner continued to work widely after the series ended, including as a voice actor. He received two Grammy nominations for audiobook performances, and he voiced characters on ‘90s cartoons like Spider-Man, Captain Planet and the Planeteers, Gargoyles and Batman: The Animated Series. He also famously voiced the main role of Carl Fredricksen in Pixar’s Up and played Santa Claus in Elf.
His later roles included Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, The Good Wife, Dead to Me, Cobra Kai and the animated series Central Park.
In 2001, Asner received the Screen Actors Guild Life Achievement Award.
Asner was married to Nancy Lou Sykes from 1959 to 1988. They shared children Matthew, Liza and Kate. In 1987, he welcomed a son, Charles, with Carol Jean Vogelman. He married producer Cindy Gilmore in 1998. She filed for legal separation in 2007, and he filed for divorce in 2015.
Asner died in 2021 at age 91.
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Gavin MacLeod as Murray Slaughter
Gavin MacLeod played Murray Slaughter, WJM-TV’s news writer. He and Moore were the only characters to appear in every episode of the series.
He immediately moved from one hit series to another when he was cast in The Love Boat as the ship’s captain Merrill Stubing. It premiered in 1977. He told PEOPLE in 1978 he didn’t spend time feeling sad about his old job being over. “When something’s over, forget it,” he said. “I don’t miss it at all. We were close. But I don’t miss my ex-wife either.”
“Being an underdog and coming out a winner gives any human being satisfaction,” he said of his career; he had more than 300 TV parts before he landed his major TV shows. “I’m doing exactly what I want. I give thanks all the time.”
The Love Boat aired until 1986 and also had a series of TV movies. His later TV appearances included Oz, Touched by an Angel and The Suite Life on Deck. In 2013, MacLeod released a memoir, This Is Your Captain Speaking: My Fantastic Voyage Through Hollywood, Faith & Life.
MacLeod shared four children — Keith, David, Julie and Meghan — with his first wife Joan F. Rootvik, whom he met when she was Rockette. They divorced in 1972.
In 1974, he married Patti Kendig. They divorced in 1982. But both MacLeod and Kendig became evangelical Christians, which they said led them back to each other, and they remarried in 1985.
MacLeod died in 2021 at age 90.
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Valerie Harper as Rhoda Morgenstern
Ted Knight played Ted Baxter, a vain and untalented newscaster. He received six Emmy nominations for his role, winning once.
He told PEOPLE in 1977 that he rejected an offer to do a spinoff. “I love the guy … but who could take Ted Baxter for 30 minutes each week?” he said. He did reprise his role, in a way, in a series of regional commercials, and starred in the short-lived The Ted Knight Show. “I was talked into that series by my avarice,” he told PEOPLE in 1982. “I was tickled when it went off the air.”
He also guest-starred on The Love Boat and appeared in 1980’s Caddyshack.
Knight then starred in the TV series Too Close for Comfort, which was later renamed The Ted Knight Show. It ran from 1980 to 1987. Knight played a cartoonist whose adult daughters lived downstairs from him and his wife, and his character was famous for wearing sweatshirts for different colleges and universities, which were sent to him by fans. “Ted was the buffoon, the butt of all the humor,” he said in 1982. “Too Close for Comfort has opened up new vistas of comic possibilities for me.” He added, “People like us because we glamorize family life. They say it doesn’t insult them — that they can be comfortable and entertained.”
Knight married Dorothy Smith in 1948. They shared three kids: Ted Jr., Elyse and Eric.
Knight was diagnosed with colon cancer shortly after Mary Tyler Moore ended. The cancer returned in 1985, and Knight died in 1986. He was 62.
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Cloris Leachman as Phyllis Lindstrom
Cloris Leachman played Phyllis Lindstrom, Mary’s snobby friend and landlady. She, too, received her own spinoff, leading Phyllis for two years. Pre-Mary Tyler Moore, she already had earned an Oscar for 1971’s The Last Picture Show.
Leachman won eight Emmys with 22 nominations, including wins for The Mary Tyler Moore Show, and guest appearances on Cher, Promised Land and Malcolm in the Middle. Her eight wins are the most by a performer for acting (a number Julia Louis-Dreyfus matched).
Leachman also appeared in movies like 1981’s Yesterday, 1986’s Castle in the Sky, 2004’s Spanglish and 2005’s Mrs. Harris. She was inducted into the Television Academy Hall of Fame in 2011.
In 2008, Leachman competed on Dancing with the Stars. The next year, she published her memoir, Cloris.
From 1953 to 1978, Leachman was married to George Englund. They shared children Bryan, Dinah, Adam and Morgan. Bryan died of an overdose in 1986.
Leachman died in 2021 at age 94.
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Georgia Engel as Georgette Franklin Baxter
Betty White, already a TV star, joined The Mary Tyler Moore Show in the fourth season as Sue Ann Nivens, appearing after Harper’s Rhoda left. Moore told the Archive of American Television in 1997, “They wrote a character who was described as being ‘as sweet as Betty White but as vicious as a barracuda.’ I said to the writers after hearing mumblings about it, ‘Well, we’re auditioning, but we haven’t found this character. Why don’t you actually interview Betty White?’ ”
At the time, White was known as an absolute sweetheart, but Sue Ann was a home-wrecker who had an affair with Phyllis’ husband. White won two Emmys for the role on three nominations.
Still, White told PEOPLE in 1976 that she supported Moore’s decision to end the show. “Mary knows when to quit,” she said.
White met her husband Allen Ludden when she appeared on an episode of Password, which he hosted. They wed in 1963 and she became stepmother to his children David, Martha and Sarah. Ludden died of stomach cancer in 1981.
In 1983, White began appearing on Mama’s Family in a recurring role, based on a role she had played on The Carol Burnett Show in 1975. She also hosted her own game show, Just Men!. She became the first woman to win the Daytime Emmy Award for outstanding game show host.
White’s biggest triumph came in 1985 when she was cast as Rose Nylund in The Golden Girls. The hit series became a classic (in both its first run and the decades of syndication that followed). White received seven Emmy nominations for the show, winning once. She also starred in the spinoff The Golden Palace.
White went on to star in the TV shows Maybe This Time and Hot in Cleveland, won two more Emmys for appearing on The John Larroquette Show and hosting Saturday Night Live and won a Grammy for the audiobook of her 2011 book If You Ask Me (And of Course You Won’t). She continued to make regular TV appearances through 2019 and starred in the movie The Proposal. She also worked as a voice actress in The Lorax and Toy Story 4.
In 1999, as White celebrated her 50th year on television, she told PEOPLE, “I’ve been the luckiest broad on the face of this earth.”
“You better realize how good life is while it’s happening,” she said, “because before you know it, it will all be gone.”
White died on December 31, 2022, just days before her 100th birthday.
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John Amos as Gordon Howard
CBS via Getty; Eric McCandless via Getty
John Amos appeared as weatherman Gordon “Gordy” Howard on The Mary Tyler Moore Show.
Amos went on to star as James Evans Sr. in Good Times. He admitted to PEOPLE in 1977 that he didn’t get along with creator Norman Lear, calling them “two billy goats butting heads.” “But he owned the pasture,” he added.
He also received acclaim for playing older Kunta Kinte in Roots, for which he received an Emmy nomination. The series, he said in 1977, “helped shrink my head and put the whole business in perspective. My ego was getting in the way — I had a bad case of the biggies.”
“I wanted to make an important motion picture, like tomorrow morning,” he said. “But Roots taught me it took us 200 years to get where we are now.”
Amos also starred in Hunter and on The West Wing as Admiral Percy Fitzwallace. He also made dozens of guest appearances on TV, including in 30 Rock, Ballers, Two and a Half Men, Touched by an Angel and The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.
Amos was married twice: He wed artist Noel “Noni” Mickelson in 1965, and they welcomed two children, daughter Shannon and son Kelly Christopher “K.C.”
After their divorce in 1975, Amos briefly wed actress Lillian Lehman, though details about their relationship are private.
Amos died in October 2024 at 84. He was the last surviving member of The Mary Tyler Moore Show cast.
