Meara, half of famed comedy duo, dies at 85

In this Nov. 12, 2008, file photo, comedian Anne Meara attends the Museum of the Moving Image Salute to Ben Stiller in New York. Meara, whose comic work with husband Jerry Stiller helped launch a 60-year career in film and TV, has died.
In this Nov. 12, 2008, file photo, comedian Anne Meara attends the Museum of the Moving Image Salute to Ben Stiller in New York. Meara, whose comic work with husband Jerry Stiller helped launch a 60-year career in film and TV, has died.

Anne Meara, who became famous as half of one of the most successful male-female comedy teams of all time and went on to enjoy a long and diverse career as an actress and, late in life, a playwright, died Saturday in Manhattan. She was 85.

Her death was confirmed by her husband and longtime comedy partner, Jerry Stiller, and by her son, actor and director Ben Stiller. They did not provide the cause of death.

Meara was an experienced but relatively unknown stage actress when she joined forces with Jerry Stiller as members of the Compass Players, an improvisational theater troupe that later evolved into Second City, and later on their own as Stiller and Meara. The duo began performing in New York nightclubs in 1961 and within a year had become a national phenomenon.

But even during the heyday of Stiller and Meara, Meara pursued a separate career as an actress. She had already amassed an impressive list of stage credits before beginning her comedy career, including an Obie Award-winning performance in Madchen in Uniform in 1955 and roles in several Shakespeare in the Park productions. (She was a witch in Macbeth in 1957.)

She later appeared both on and off Broadway, in films, and especially on television, where she was seen on a wide variety of series, including Rhoda and Archie Bunker's Place on CBS and Sex and the City and Oz on HBO.

Meara was born in Brooklyn, N.Y., on Sept. 20, 1929, and was raised in Rockville Centre on Long Island. An only child, she was the daughter of Edward Meara, a lawyer, and the former Mary Dempsey, who committed suicide when her daughter was 11. After studying for a year at the Dramatic Workshop at the New School in Manhattan, Anne Meara began her career in summer stock in 1948.

She met Stiller in 1953 and married him soon after, but it would be some time before they began working as a team.

In the 1960s, Stiller and Meara were regular guests on the variety and talk shows of Ed Sullivan and many others, and performed in nightclubs all over the country. In the 1970s, their voices were heard on radio commercials for Blue Nun wine and other products.

Meara and Stiller's relationship was the basis for their best-known comedy routines, which told the continuing story of Hershey Horowitz and Mary Elizabeth Doyle, a short Jewish man and a tall Catholic woman who had virtually nothing in common except their love for each other. (Meara, though born and raised Roman Catholic, converted to Judaism in 1961.)

Later on, she made several guest appearances on the sitcom The King of Queens, on which Stiller was a regular; her character married his in the series finale in 2007.

In addition to her prodigious prime-time work, she appeared occasionally on the soap opera All My Children in the 1990s. During her career, she was nominated for four Emmy Awards and won a Writers Guild Award as a co-writer for The Other Woman, a 1983 TV movie.

She had memorable character parts in a number of movies as well, including a teacher in Fame (1980) and a personnel manager in Reality Bites (1994), Ben Stiller's feature-film directorial debut. Onstage, she was in the original off-Broadway production of John Guare's dark comedy The House of Blue Leaves in 1971 -- her son had a small role in the 1986 Broadway revival and the lead role in a second revival, in 2011 -- and she was nominated for a Tony for Anna Christie in 1993.

Meara branched out into writing in 1995, when her comedy After-Play was presented off-Broadway. Her Down the Garden Paths had a brief off-Broadway run in 2000, with a cast headed by Eli Wallach and Anne Jackson.

In addition to her husband and her son, Meara is survived by a daughter, actress and comedian Amy Stiller, and two grandchildren.

A Section on 05/26/2015

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