Louise Lasser, star of cult sitcom Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman and Woody Allen comedies, dies aged 87
Get the Culture newsletter
Daily culture — film, music, books, the trends and ideas worth your attention. Free.
- Louise Lasser died at age 87 at her home in Manhattan, according to The New York Times, leaving a career that spanned cult TV, Woody Allen's early films, and later dramatic roles.
- Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman ran from January 1976 to July 1977 with a punishing five-days-a-week schedule that squeezed more than 300 episodes out of two seasons, making Lasser a national star and landing her on the covers of People and Rolling Stone.
- Norman Lear cast Lasser as the show's suburban Ohio housewife after she auditioned, saying in an interview: "She came in my office, started to read the lines, and forget it. There's only one Louise Lasser."
- Lasser's Woody Allen collaborations included a small role in Take the Money and Run (1969) and larger parts in Bananas (1971) and Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (1972); she and Allen met on a double date in the early 1960s and married in 1966, divorcing after four years.
- Lasser's late-career work ranged from Todd Solondz's Happiness and Darren Aronofsky's Requiem for a Dream — where she played Ellen Burstyn's neighbor — to a 2014 arc on Lena Dunham's Girls as an artist who gives Jemima Kirke's Jessa a job.
- Lasser understudied a 19-year-old Barbra Streisand on Broadway in 1962's I Can Get It for You Wholesale and appeared in a well-known NyQuil commercial in which she coolly replies "I know" when her cold-stricken husband says he's lucky to have her.
- Lasser is survived by her long-term partner, actor Michael Citriniti; her marriage to Allen was her only one.
Why it matters: Lasser's death closes a chapter on a singularly odd career arc — a comedic actress whose biggest fame came from a five-day-a-week parody soap that exhausted her so thoroughly she struggled to follow it up, even as her early Allen films and later indie work kept her in the cultural conversation for decades.
