Louise Lasser, the deadpan comic actress who became forever linked with Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, died Monday at her home in Manhattan. She was 87.
Susan Charlotte, a friend, reported the death to. For viewers who knew Lasser through her clipped timing and wide-eyed stare, the loss lands now because it closes the life of the performer who turned an odd, fragile style into a national television identity.
Lasser had already made her way into popular culture before the role that defined her. She appeared in early Woody Allen films, married Woody Allen in 1966, and showed up in commercials for NyQuil and Excedrin. In 1962, she briefly appeared on Broadway as Barbra Streisand's replacement in I Can Get It for You Wholesale. Those credits made her familiar. Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman made her impossible to miss.
The series became an unlikely phenomenon in January 1976, when Lasser took on the title character in the Norman Lear soap opera parody. It was televised in syndication five days a week in half-hour installments, ran until July 1977 and produced 325 episodes. In the fictional town of Fernwood, Lasser's performance gave the show its off-kilter center and made her a star to fans of the series and to television viewers far beyond it.
That fame also carried a harder edge. In May 1976, Lasser was arrested after a disturbance at a Beverly Hills antiques store, and police found 80 milligrams of coke in her purse. She later said a fan had given it to her and that she had forgotten she had it. The contradiction sat right beside the image the public knew: a performer celebrated for deadpan control who was also living through a period of public unraveling.
Lasser's death leaves unanswered what was not disclosed Monday: the cause, and whether there will be a public memorial or statement from her family. What is clear is that the woman who once looked as if she were delivering every line a beat late had become part of television history, and that history now has an ending.
