Mary Tyler Moore

The show was produced by Danny Thomas's company, and Thomas himself recommended her. He remembered Mary as "the girl with three names" whom he had turned down earlier. Moore's energetic comic performances as Van Dyke's character's wife, begun at age 24 (eleven years Van Dyke's junior), made both the actress and her signature tight capri pants extremely popular, and she became internationally famous. When she won an Emmy award for her portrayal of Laura Petrie, she said, "I know this will never happen again." Mary Tyler Moore recently stated on The Rachael Ray Show that she was actually 23 years old when she first starred on the Dick Van Dyke Show. She had told producers that she was 25 because she heard that initially Dick Van Dyke had stated that she might be too young for the part.

In 1970, after having appeared earlier in a pivotal one-hour musical special called "Dick Van Dyke and the Other Woman", Moore and husband Grant Tinker successfully pitched a sitcom centered on Moore to CBS. The Mary Tyler Moore Show was a half-hour newsroom sitcom featuring Ed Asner as her gruff boss Lou Grant, a character that would later be spun off into an hour-long dramatic series. The premise of the single working woman's life, alternating during the program between work and home, became a television staple. After six years of ratings in the top 20, the show slipped to number #39 during its seventh season. Read Less