Louise Lasser, the star of “Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman,” Norman Lear's satirical soap opera, has died. She was 87 years old.
Lasser's friend, Susan Charlotte, confirmed the actor's death to the New York Times on Monday in Manhattan.
Lasser was born in New York City on April 11, 1939, to parents Sol Jay Lasser, a tax specialist, and Paula Lasser, a designer. He attended Brandeis University, where he majored in political science and performed in musicals and cabaret. He dropped out of his senior year to pursue acting.
“My career started almost too easy,” he told the Los Angeles Times in 1975. “In New York, the first agent I met sent me to my first audition and I was hired for a spectacular role. [a replacement for Barbra Streisand in ‘I Can Get It for You Wholesale’]. “After that there was an avalanche of offers.”
She told The Times that she was afraid of achieving great success with so little training.
“I had to feel prepared,” she said. So, he studied with actor and acting teacher Sanford Meisner and worked hard.
“I firmly believe that what is worth doing is worth doing to the best of your ability. But it is very important to know what you want to do. How you can develop your potential to the fullest, live your life to the fullest and to the fullest.”
Lasser joked in a 1976 article in The Times that her role as Mary Hartman might merit identification beyond being Woody Allen's ex-wife. The two met in 1962 on a double date (with other people), but their chemistry was potent and they began working together on several projects, including their first television project, “The Laughmakers,” an unaired pilot written by Allen.
“When we met, I was hanging out with a friend of his. It was one of those things, well, if you think you're complicated, you should meet so-and-so. And it was Woody,” Lasser told Toast in a 2013 interview. “They were meant to be in the same park,” he said. “We immediately connected. He was with someone…oh, he was married, that's true…So, I met him, and it was very clear the whole night that the four of us were there, and none of us were talking to anyone else, you know what I mean?…We really understood what the other one was saying.”
The two were married from 1966 to 1970. Lasser starred in Allen's “Take the Money and Run” (1969), “Bananas” (1971), and the 1972 film “Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask).”
In the early '70s, he appeared in several films and television shows, including “The Bob Newhart Show” and “The Mary Tyler Moore Show.” At some point, television's biggest producer caught wind of Lasser's abilities and wanted her for his pet project, a parody of soapy daytime dramas called “Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman.”
During an interview featured in an oral history of American television by the Television Academy Foundation, Lear said he had taken the script for the series to a colleague, they read it and said, “You can't do this without Louise Lasser.”
“She came into my office, started reading the lines and forgot about it,” Lear said. “There is only one Louise Lasser.”
Lasser, discouraged by the soap opera nature of the show, turned down the role five times.
“I kept saying, no, it's just not right,” he said during a show reunion in 2000. “I had no job, no money… It was just like that, so after the fifth meeting I said to my manager, 'You mean he's never going to call me again?'
“Then my friend said, ‘You know, I think you don't really want to say no.’ So I thought my rationalization was, well, maybe it would be really good for me to work for 52 weeks a year.”
Lasser played Hartman in 315 of the show's 325 episodes over the course of 18 months.
