Louise Lasser, star of cult sitcom Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman and Woody Allen comedies, dies aged 87 — SkimNews
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- Louise Lasser died at age 87 at her home in Manhattan, according to the New York Times.
- Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman ran from January 1976 to July 1977, squeezing more than 300 episodes into its two-season, five-days-a-week schedule as a satirical parody of daytime soap operas set in suburban Ohio.
- Lasser's four-year marriage to Woody Allen followed their meeting on a double date in 1962, when Allen wrote the unaired ABC pilot The Laughmakers in which she starred; she went on to appear in his Take the Money and Run (1969), Bananas (1971), and Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (1972).
- Norman Lear, who created Mary Hartman, recalled the casting: "She came in my office, started to read the lines, and forget it. There's only one Louise Lasser."
- Lasser trained under celebrated acting coach Sanford Meisner after studying political science, and in 1962 understudied a 19-year-old Barbra Streisand making her Broadway debut in I Can Get It for You Wholesale.
- Lasser's later career included guest spots on The Bob Newhart Show, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, and Taxi, plus film roles in Happiness, Mystery Men, Requiem for a Dream, and Lena Dunham's Girls in 2014, which introduced her to a new generation.
- Michael Citriniti, her long-term partner, survives her; she was married only once, to Allen.
Why it matters: Lasser was a singular cult-TV presence whose five-days-a-week parody of soap operas earned her People and Rolling Stone covers, and whose three early Woody Allen comedies remain touchstones of 1970s screen humor. Her death closes a chapter on a satirical sensibility — domestic surrealism laced with unsettling violence — that prefigured cable comedy and later Norman Lear projects.
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