Cloris Leachman

Cloris Leachman was an American actress.

In a career spanning over seven decades, Leachman won eight Primetime Emmy Awards, one Daytime Emmy Award, and one Academy Award for her role in The Last Picture Show.

Leachman's longest-running role was the nosy, cunning, self-centered, and manipulative landlady Phyllis Lindstrom on the CBS sitcom The Mary Tyler Moore Show, and its subsequent spin-off series, Phyllis, in the 1970s.

She also played the violin-playing Frau Blücher in Mel Brooks' 1974 classic horror spoof Young Frankenstein. She also appeared for Brooks as the evil Nurse Diesel in High Anxiety (1977) and as tavern owner Madame Defarge in History of the World: Part I (1987).

At age 82, Leachman competed on Dancing With the Stars, and just before she turned 90, she accepted the role of Zorya Vechernyaya, the eldest of three sisters who watch over the constellations, on the Starz fantasy drama American Gods. She appeared on television in every decade from the 1940s to the 2010s.

Cloris Leachman was inducted into the Television Academy Hall of Fame in 2011.

Leachman died January 27, 2021, in Encinitas, California. She was 94.