Cloris Leachman's beginnings

Streetwalker. $4 handjobs were her specialty.

Wasn't she in a Miss America pageant but didn't win. Great actress but never found her pretty enough to certainly compete to win Miss America.

She must have been a Beverly Hills housewife in the 1950s, if her home was a neighborhood refuge for Judy Garland's children.

Also, her husband had an affair with Joan Collins.

[quote] if her home was a neighborhood refuge for Judy Garland's children.

Refuge? I was molested there.

Lorna - did you get a $4 handjob? It was the house specialty.

She has multiple screen credits going back to 1947...so she was working some.

Quite a few Miss America contestants are borderline ugly r2...the first winner, Margaret Gorman, was a real dog - dumpy and round-shouldered.

She was a regular on one of the incarnations of "Lassie" in the 1950s.

She was one of Lassie's many moms. Does that make here a bitch?

[quote] Lorna - did you get a $4 handjob?

$4!? Bitch charged me $6, and this was in 1959. Mama spent less on pills in a week back then.

I loved watching her get tortured and killed at the beginning of "Kiss Me, Deadly".

Looking at imdb, her credits were practically all tv work from the start, 1947. So by MTM, she had to have been a familiar tv face, if not the household name she became playing Phyllis. But really, someone who remembers her pre-MTM career should comment on that.

She was on a very creepy episode of the original Twilight Zone once.

I think first film she was in was a Mike Hammer film. She's running down the street with no shoes on, escaped from an insane asylum. Love that film, but can't think of name right now. It does state "Introducing Cloris Leachman", I think.

She certainly wasn't big in cabaret.

I wonder if she was cast as Lynda Carter's mother in Wonder Woman partly because of the Miss America connection? The should have cast Julie Newmar.

What I could never figure out is how she managed to talk them into ALWAYS billing her as "Special Guest Star" on MTM when (1) she was practically a regular (how many non-regulars get spinoffs?) and (2) there were many bigger names who guested on MTM and didn't get that billing.

Look at her "they're not fooling anybody" tits.

I'm guessing if she was Lassie's mom she probably wasn't taken too seriously actress.

I did read that they were shocked at MTM how funny she was when they hired her. Phyllis was supposed to be more of a patrician doctor's wife but Leachman made her much more neurotic than they expected.

I did find she had a wide variety of Bway credits everything from Nellie Forbush to The Crucible. That's where she got her chops I guess.

She replaced Mary Martin in the original production of South Pacific.

A youngish Cloris...

[quote] What I could never figure out is how she managed to talk them into ALWAYS billing her as "Special Guest Star" on MTM when (1) she was practically a regular (how many non-regulars get spinoffs?) and (2) there were many bigger names who guested on MTM and didn't get that billing.

Oscar?

She looks a little Stritchy in that shot.

She replaced Mary Martin during her vacation. About a week. Fun fact: Mabel Albertson, who played Darren Steven's mother on Bewitched, along with thousands of other crotchety old ladies, was Cloris Leachman's Mother -in-law. Supposedly very close.

R18 you think those are fake?

R22 she was on MTM a year before THE LAST PICTURE SHOW came out and two years before her Oscar win.

She's on less shows than it seems r17. They discuss that on the commentary tracks of the DVDs.

She was only on 10 in the first season and less as the years went by.

The producers say her impact was so great that people always think she was on much more than she actually was.

She was very young when she did South Pacific. Not even 30. How appropriate.

Kiss Me Deadly. R14.

[quote](how many non-regulars get spinoffs?)

and then there's Maude.

Rita Moreno wasn't a regular on the Golden Girls, was she?

Kiss Me Deadly is a great movie!

Below is a clip from the movie, with a young Cloris in 1955.

She was Celia to Kate Hepburn's Rosalind.

R27 according to IMDb, she was only in 38 episodes of MTM spanning 1970-1977.

I remember seeing Cloris Leachman in an old episone of Marcus Welby, I think that was pre-MTM. Looking back on it, the episone was hystrical. On the show, Cloris played th emother of a teen age girl who had just lost a huge amount of weight thanks toDr. Welby's supervised diet. The kid is finall able to wear a bikini and be attractive to boys, one of whome does her in th eback of her van and the kid gets the clap. Of course it just takes a couple of shots and a few pills, but Cloris's charachter absolutely freaks out. I can still hear her carring on "it's so so so dirrrrrrrteeeeee!"

Didn't Cloris do a TV movie about getting and STI?

inunformed ?? really OP?

She was one of DL's most pitied creatures, a not famous but consistently employed American working actor.... horrors.

Her work on the Rhoda wedding episode was sublime.

Northwestern Grad along with Patricia O'Neal

[quote] She was one of DL's most pitied creatures, a not famous but consistently employed American working actor.... horrors.

Like, did she always, like, have the same hair?

Patricia O'Neal?

Founding and Lifetime Member of the Actors Studio.

Yes r36!!!

It was playing on TV in my hotel the day I arrived for my first ever trip to London about 10 years ago.

"Someone I Touched" !!!

Do they usually run a lot of old TV movies in the day in London?

Not TV movies from the 70s they don't.

Another interesting TV movie of Cloris' is "Haunts of the Very Rich."

It is basically what they stole "Lost" from.

I remember thru all the Lost years thinking...it is just that old Cloris Leachman/Lloyd Bridges movie.

Didn't she also make a Housewives Bank Robbers TV movie with Barbara Harris?

"Haunts of the Very Rich" is a rip-off of "Outward Bound."

True. r48. (and extra points for you for a very theatrical reference!!!)

Backdoor pilots (like the Rita Moreno "Empty Nest") aren't spinoffs. And it didn't even go to series.

She's just someone who worked pretty steadily, not very well known, waiting for the chance to break out. And when it came, both via MTM and Last Picture Show, she seized her acting opportunities by the balls and did not let go.

She won me with her roles in Mel Brooks' movies.

Her performance in Last Picture Show merits one of the great Oscar wins.

She gave birth to the incredibly hot soap stud Morgan Englund.

"Someone I Touched" was on Netflix or Amazon Prime not long ago. HIlarious -- they tried to broach the subject of VD "in good taste" in a TV movie, but what it amounted to was Cloris' husband sleeping with the town tart and then clapping up poor Cloris ... OR SO SHE THINKS.

And the 1970s design factor is turned up to 11!

"The Powerful Story of Four People Whose Care-Free Love Led to a TERRIFYING EPIDEMIC!" *

* until they got some penicillin

PHYLLIS LINDSTROM: "Mary... do you want to know what Lars says after he makes love to me?"

MARY RICHARDS: "Oh no, Phyllis, I [italic]really[/italic] don't want..."

PHYLLIS LINDSTROM: "He says, 'Phyllis, jag är klar' [translated: 'Phyllis, I am finished']... But that's all over now..."

When the cast of the original Lassie left, Cloris played the new character Ruth Martin for one season before being replaced in the same role by June Lockhart. The producers replaced her and the actor playing her husband for numerous reasons, including the fact that she was unhappy playing the part, audience response was not strong and she refused to do commercials for the show's sponsor, Campbell's Soup. "I make my own soup. I don't eat yours." she told them.

For many years those episodes were not included in syndication packages, making her Lassie's lost mother.

Cloris had a memorable one-scene role as Agnes, the hooker who gets to bed Paul Newman, in Butch Cassidy in 1969, just before she started with MTM.

The reason she got the part was because in 1956 she played the love interest of Paul Newman in a forgotten film called "The Rack" that had been one of Newman's rare flops in his early film days, and he always felt Cloris deserved another shot - they'd known each other at the Actor's Studio. She and Joanne Woodward remain close friends.

[quote] I did read that they were shocked at MTM how funny she was when they hired her.

That parallels AbFab's Joanna Lumley. Middle-aged tv actress suddenly becomes bigger than ever in a sitcom, when she'd never been known for comedy previously.

Would someone please suggest to the illiterate OP the consultation of Google? I would, but I fear I would end up calling her a lazy cunt.

Another fun find:

[italic]Death Sentence[/italic] (1974): Cloris plays a juror who thinks the wrong man (Nick Nolte) is on trial for murder ... and her own life is endangered once she starts suspecting who the real killer is!

Like, I don't, like, know R41, like, that's an interesting, like, question, like.

The Leachman-O'Neal feud -

Did she really get gangbanged at Studio 54?

It's about time we had a thread on Cloris Leachman's beginnings.

"Haunts of the Very Rich" is on youtube with Robert Reed as a troubled priest or reverend. I don't know what happens - I only watched the first five minutes.

R59 The Rack is a middling film, but it gives Newman a good role and he is fantastic--one of his great performances.