Louise Lasser, star of cult 70s sitcom Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman and early films by Woody Allen (to whom she was married for four years), has died aged 87. The New York Times reported she died “at home in Manhattan”.
Lasser’s role as a satirically conceived housewife in suburban Ohio in Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, designed as a parody of daytime soap operas, made her a national star, landing her on the cover of People magazine and Rolling Stone. The series lasted a year and a half, between January 1976 and July 1977, but due to its five-days-a-week schedule squeezed more than 300 episodes out of its two season run. Lasser’s Hartman, with her signature pigtails, was preoccupied with domestic minutiae but found herself in unsettling and disturbing situations, including bizarre deaths. The show was intended to explore the changes sweeping ordinary life in the US in the 1970s.
Lasser’s work on film with Allen is perhaps better known to non-US audiences; she had a small role in Allen’s 1969 mockumentary Take the Money and Run, and considerably larger ones in Bananas (1971) and Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex* (*But Were Afraid to Ask) (1972). In Bananas, she plays the activist who Allen’s Fielding Mellish attempts to impress by going to the (fictional) Latin American country of San Marcos, which is the throes of revolution; in the latter she appears in Allen’s brilliant parody of modernist Italian cinema, a sketch titled Why Do Some Women Have Trouble Reaching an Orgasm?
Lasser was born in 1939, and after studying political science became a student of celebrated acting coach Sanford Meisner. In 1962, she understudied a 19-year-old Barbra Streisand, who was making her Broadway debut in the musical I Can Get It for You Wholesale. In the same year she was cast alongside Alan Alda in The Laughmakers, an unaired pilot for ABC about an improv comedy troupe. It was written by Allen, then a rising comedy star who she had met on a double date. The pair would get married four years later.
She also appeared in guest roles in TV series such as The Bob Newhart Show, The Mary Tyler Moore Show and McCloud. At the same time, she was cast in a string of commercials, including a well-known one for NyQuil, in which her cold-affected husband tells her: “I’m lucky to have you”, and she replies: “I know.”
Lasser was cast in Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman after impressing the show’s creator, Norman Lear, who said in an interview: “She came in my office, started to read the lines, and forget it. There’s only one Louise Lasser.” However, the show’s bruising schedule appeared to take a toll, and Lasser found it hard to follow it up.
She subsequently appeared in TV shows including Taxi, It’s a Living, Laverne & Shirley and St Elsewhere. She was later cast in high-profile films including Todd Solondz’s Happiness, superhero comedy Mystery Men, and Darren Aronofsky-directed Requiem for a Dream, as the neighbour of Ellen Burstyn’s Sara Goldfarb. Lasser was introduced to a new generation after being cast in Lena Dunham’s Girls in 2014, as an artist who gives Jemima Kirke’s Jessa a job.
Lasser was married once, to Allen, and was in a long-term relationship with fellow actor Michael Citriniti, who survives her.
