Humor keeps comedy actress Teri Garr afloat (original) (raw)

Actress Teri Garr, shown at a 2006 Women Against MS luncheon at the River Oaks Country Club, receives a Distinguished Alumni Award from California State University, Northridge today.Dave Rossman/For the Chronicle

Teri Garr has a great title for a memoir or a solo performance, but her health won't cooperate enough for her to use it.

That's a good thing. The comic actress — who receives a Distinguished Alumni Award from California State University, Northridge today — would prefer nobody have to answer the question "Does This Wheelchair Make Me Look Fat?"

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So if there's ever a sequel to her 2005 memoir, Speed Bumps: Flooring It Through Hollywood, Garr figures to go with something like One Foot in the Grave and the Other on a Banana Peel.

Rehabilitation from a brain aneurism Garr suffered in December 2006 has progressed, and the actress, 61, is back on her feet, joking that the best place to store her wheelchair is at the bottom of the swimming pool "because I don't need it."

She still has, as she puts it, "a touch of MS (multiple sclerosis)," but Garr faces the disease with humor.

Over a career that has spanned five decades and included roles in more than 140 films and TV or variety show episodes, Garr has worked for Steven Spielberg (Close Encounters of the Third Kind), Mel Brooks (Young Frankenstein), Carl Reiner (Oh, God!) and Francis Ford Coppola (One From the Heart and The Conversation).

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Garr was an Oscar nominee for playing a desperate actress in Tootsie, and she has hosted NBC's Saturday Night Live three times.