Louise Lasser in the makeup chair preparing to record an episode of Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, 1976. Photograph: John G Zimmerman Archive/Everett/Shutterstock View image in fullscreen Louise Lasser in the makeup chair preparing to record an episode of Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, 1976. Photograph: John G Zimmerman Archive/Everett/Shutterstock Film Obituary Louise Lasser obituary Actor who made her name in the TV series Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman and worked with Woody Allen on several of his early films
Prefer the Guardian on Google The zesty, ebullient actor Louise Lasser, who has died aged 87, played a harried Ohio housewife dealing with extreme events (drug addiction, mass murder, drowning-by-soup) in Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, an innovative satirical sitcom that doubled as a spoof of daytime soap operas.
Like the target of its mockery, the show aired five times a week in the US, so that its modest two-season run, between 1976 and 1977, produced a staggering 325 episodes. (UK audiences were treated to a measly nine of them in 1980; a 38-disc DVD box set was released in 2013.)
That role made Lasser a household name in the US. She was known more widely elsewhere as a fixture of several early, goofy films by Woody Allen, to whom she was married for four years. He called her “charming, smart as a whip, quick, very funny and witty”.
She is seen briefly as a giddy interviewee in a vox pop scene in Take the Money and Run (1969), his mockumentary about a hare-brained bank robber. In Bananas (1971), she played Nancy, the sweetly earnest social activist who inspires Allen’s character to join the revolution in a fictional Latin American country. A sex scene between them is staged like a sporting event, complete with breathless commentary from the real-life sports broadcaster Howard Cosell.
An attempted break-up conversation becomes amusingly circuitous when Nancy struggles to articulate exactly why she wants to end the relationship: “Maybe if you could guess a few things …?” Lasser’s vague dottiness is the ideal foil for Allen’s neurotic bluster.
View image in fullscreen Lasser with Alan Alda in Class of ‘55, a TV comedy, 1972. Photograph: Walt Disney Television Photo Archives/Disney General Entertainment Content/Getty Images She made a notable contribution to Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex* (*But Were Afraid to Ask) (1972), which comprises seven irreverent sketches inspired by the popular sex manual of the same name. Lasser appeared as a woman who can only climax in public; the vignette, entitled “Why Do Some Women Have Trouble Reaching an Orgasm?”, was a parody of chic Italian arthouse cinema.
Allen had considered dropping the sequence at script stage. She argued for keeping it, and pointed out that it would be more effective played “with rich modern Italians” than in the rough-and-ready neorealist style he had envisaged. “I hear footsteps in a large corridor and I see Ferraris and that kind of thing,” she said. Allen recalled resisting at first: “Then all of a sudden the name Antonioni started flashing and I said, ‘Yes’.” The pair delivered their dialogue in phonetic Italian, with English subtitles running beneath them.
Another sketch, in which Lasser played a black widow spider waiting at the centre of her web to consume her mate (Allen) after sex, was shot at some expense but scrapped when a satisfactory payoff proved elusive.
She was born in New York City, to Paula (nee Cohen), an interior decorator, and Sol Lass…