Louise Lasser, the actor with a more than six-decade career on stage and screen and is perhaps best remembered for starring in Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, has died. The news was shared by Lasser’s Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman costar Claudia Lamb, who shared that the news came from Lasser’s partner. The New York Times also confirmed the news via Lasser’s friend Susan Charlotte. Lasser was 87 years old.
From January 1976 until July 1977, Lasser starred in 325 episodes of Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, a satirical soap opera that aired five nights per week over its first and second seasons. Lasser was nominated for an Emmy Award for her work on the show. Lasser also appeared in several of her ex-husband Woody Allen’s early films, including Take The Money And Run and Bananas, and in episodes of The Mary Tyler Moore Show, The Bob Newhart Show, Taxi, It’s A Living, and Girls.
Born in New York City in 1939, Lasser got her acting start in the early 1960s in Greenwich Village. An early role came in the 1962 Broadway production of I Can Get It For You Wholesale, a musical best remembered for being the Broadway debut of Barbra Streisand; Lasser was Streisand’s understudy as Miss Marmelstein and eventually took over the role. In 1967, Lasser appeared in her second and final Broadway musical, Henry, Sweet Henry.
By the late 1960s, Lasser was making her way on to the screen, both in television and film. In 1966, she married Woody Allen and began appearing in his films, starting with a voice appearance in What’s Up, Tiger Lily?, for which she also received a writing credit. She earned larger parts in films like Take The Money And Run, Bananas, and Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex* (*But Were Afraid to Ask), and, despite divorcing in 1970, she continued to work with him up until 1980’s Stardust Memories. Throughout the late 60s and early 70s, she also worked fairly consistently in television.
But the defining role of Lasser’s career would come in 1976 when Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman premiered. The show, created by Norman Lear, was both hilarious and dark, with Lasser’s titular character frequently followed by death and destruction. Within minutes of the first episode, Mary has already been confronted with both a waxy yellow buildup on her kitchen floor and a mass murder a block away. Lasser later recalled having not heard of Lear when her manager first brought the project to her attention, and said she wasn’t interested in doing a TV soap. Eventually she agreed, and, despite some controversies around the show’s pickup, it was a quick success. Wrote Brandon Norwalk for The A.V. Club in 2013, “More than anything, Mary Hartman’s mixture of involving melodrama and absurdist detachment laid the groundwork for its closest successor, Twin Peaks, making Mary a spiritual ancestor of the turn-of-the-century renaissance in TV drama. Ultimately the legacy of Mary Hartman is self-consciousness, its awareness of itself—of life—as a ridiculous soap opera that must still be taken seriously.”
Producing five episodes per week took a toll, as Lasser willingly admitted. Later in 1976, she would host a controversial episode of Saturday Night Live, and was arrested the same year for cocaine possession. During a retrospective interview with the Television Academy, Lasser expressed how difficult it was to process what had actually happened during the frantic pace of production. “I couldn’t function for a while, it took me a long time to sort of snap out of it,” she admitted when discussing finding other roles when Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman ended. “I was so confused by what had happened to me and who that character was.” Though she continued working, she never appeared as part of the main cast of a television show again; her longest recurring role was on It’s A Living, in which she appeared in 14 episodes as Maggie McBurney.
In the final decades of her life, Lasser often appeared in off-beat, auteur-driven projects. In 1998, she portrayed Mona Jordan, the wife to Ben Gazzara’s Lenny Jordan, in Todd Solondz’s Happiness. In 2000, she appeared in Requiem For A Dream, and her final film role was in 2022’s Funny Pages. Her last recurring television role came when she portrayed Beadie on Girls, a character who tries to get Jessa (Jemima Kirke) to help her with an assisted suicide before abruptly changing her mind. Around that time, Lasser did another round of press reflecting on the impact of Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman. As she told Interview, “People always say it’s way ahead of its time. I never thought it was ahead of its time. I always thought it was of its time.”
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