Valerie Harper

Valerie Kathryn Harper was born on August 22, 1939, in Suffern, New York, to Howard Donald Harper, a traveling lighting salesman of English and French-Canadian ancestry, and Iva Mildred Harper, a teacher and nurse of French-Canadian, Irish, Scottish, and Welsh ancestry whose own origins were in Dalmeny, Saskatchewan. Harper's parents had married in Alberta before her mother immigrated to the United States. The middle child between her sister Leanne and her brother Merrill, Harper was raised Catholic and attended several Catholic schools. Her first and middle names were drawn from tennis players Valerie Scott and Kay Stammers, doubles partners who had won a tournament her father was attending on the day she was born. After her parents divorced in 1957, she gained a half-sister, Virginia, from her father's second marriage.

Because her father's sales work required frequent relocation, Harper's childhood unfolded across multiple states. The family lived in Northampton, Massachusetts, then South Orange, New Jersey, where she began childhood dance classes, before moving to California and settling briefly in Altadena, Pasadena, and Monroe, Michigan. In 1951 the family established itself in Ashland, Oregon, where Harper attended junior high school for three years. The family subsequently moved to Jersey City, New Jersey, where she attended Lincoln High School before graduating from the private Young Professionals School on West 56th Street in New York City, whose classmates included Sal Mineo, Tuesday Weld, and Carol Lynley.

Harper launched her professional career as a dancer and chorus girl on Broadway, appearing in productions that included Wildcat, starring Lucille Ball, Take Me Along, starring Jackie Gleason, and Subways Are for Sleeping. Several of these productions were choreographed by Michael Kidd. She made her Broadway debut as a replacement in Li'l Abner and was cast in Destry Rides Again but had to leave rehearsals due to illness. She also appeared in Paul Sills' Story Theatre and toured with Second City alongside then-husband Richard Schaal, Linda Lavin, and others. Her Broadway career spanned from 1956 to 2010, and also included Ovid's Metamorphoses and The Tale of the Allergist's Wife.

Harper's transition to television came in 1970 when casting agent Ethel Winant spotted her doing theater in Los Angeles and called her in to audition for The Mary Tyler Moore Show. She was cast as Rhoda Morgenstern, a role she played from 1970 to 1974, and then carried into the CBS spinoff series Rhoda, which ran from 1974 to 1978. For her work on The Mary Tyler Moore Show, she received the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series three times, and later won the Emmy for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Comedy Series for Rhoda. She also received a Golden Globe Award for her performance as Rhoda Morgenstern. Harper has noted that she based the character partly on her Italian-American stepmother and on Penny Ann Green, with whom she had danced in the Broadway musical Wildcat.

Her film work during this period earned additional recognition. Her supporting role in Freebie and the Bean in 1974 brought a Golden Globe nomination for New Star of the Year, and her supporting performance in the 1979 romantic comedy Chapter Two, starring James Caan and Marsha Mason, earned her a Golden Globe nomination for Best Supporting Actress. She also starred in the 1977 suspense film Night Terror and played Maggie in a 1980 telefilm adaptation of Michael Cristofer's play The Shadow Box, directed by Paul Newman.

Harper returned to series television in 1986, playing family matriarch Valerie Hogan on the NBC sitcom Valerie. Following a salary dispute with NBC and production company Lorimar, she was fired at the end of the show's second season in 1987. She sued both companies for breach of contract; her claims against NBC were dismissed, but a jury found that Lorimar had wrongfully terminated her and awarded her $1.4 million plus 12.5% of the show's profits. The series continued without her under the explanation that her character had died off-screen, was retitled Valerie's Family and then The Hogan Family, and Sandy Duncan was cast in the new role of Sandy Hogan, the character's sister-in-law.

In her later career, Harper returned to the stage in prominent roles. From 2005 to 2006, she portrayed Golda Meir in a United States national tour of the one-woman drama Golda's Balcony, and a film of that production was released in 2007. She played Tallulah Bankhead in the world-premiere production of Matthew Lombardo's Looped at the Pasadena Playhouse from June 27 to August 3, 2008, before the production moved to Arena Stage in Washington, D.C., in 2009. The play then ran on Broadway at the Lyceum Theatre beginning with previews in February 2010 through April 2010, earning Harper a Tony Award nomination for Best Actress in a Play. She was also a member of the Screen Actors Guild and ran for its presidency in 2001, losing to Melissa Gilbert, and served on SAG's Hollywood board of directors. Valerie Harper died on August 30, 2019, at the age of 80.