After a decade of hosting his talk show, David Letterman admits that Teri Garr stands out among the crowd.
Hours after news of Garro’s death at age 79, the legendary talk show host, 77, celebrated the late actress by sharing one of his favorite moments with her on his eponymous talk show on Instagram.
“Remembering one of our all-time favorite guests Teri Garr #RIP,” he captioned a throwback video of his interview with Garr ahead of the 1983 Oscars. The actress was nominated for Best Supporting Actress for her performance in Tootsie.
Terry Garr, Tootsie and Young Frankenstein Old, died at 79
“Congratulations on your success, it’s well-deserved and I hope you enjoy it,” Letterman told Garr in the video.
When asked if she had any words prepared for her big moment, the actress admitted that she hadn’t “thought about it until now, you name it.”
“I guess you’re right, I’ll have to have something to say,” she mused. “It’s embarrassing, but I was thinking about something, if I wanted to win and I realized that I have one chance in five, to get there, I would have to say something, so I started thinking about all the people I would be grateful to and things like that, you feel stupidly thinking about this.”
Teri Garr and David Letterman in 1979.
Paul Drinkwater/NBCU Photo Bank/NBCUniversal via Getty
Teri Garr’s life in photos
“It’s something you expect that might not happen and then what am I going to do with all this information if I don’t win?” Garr joked. – I would store it all in my brain.
Instead of expressing gratitude to those who helped her find her way, Garr laughed and admitted that she thought about “some people I wouldn’t thank.”
“I know you shouldn’t do that, you’re supposed to be nice and all,” she added. “I am human.”
On Tuesday, Oct. 29, the late actress’ publicist, Heidi Schaeffer, told PEOPLE that Garr died of multiple sclerosis “surrounded by family and friends.”
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Terry Garr.
Joseph Del Valle/NBC via Getty
Michael Keaton mourns ‘Wonderful’ sir mom Costar Teri Garr: ‘He’s not only great to work with, but great to be around’
In 2002, Garr publicly revealed that she had been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in her late 90s. She first started noticing symptoms during filming One From The Heart and Tootsie.
She published a memoir, Speedbumps: Flooring It Through Hollywoodin 2006, where she spoke openly about her illness. “MS is an insidious disease,” she wrote in an excerpt published by PEOPLE. “Like some of my boyfriends, he has a tendency to show up at the most inconvenient times and then disappear completely. It would take more than 20 years for doctors to figure out what was wrong. Sometimes they mentioned MS, but all the tests were clear. Then the symptoms would go away and I would forget about it, in a way.”
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Garr became a national ambassador for the National Multiple Sclerosis Society and national president of the Society’s Women Against MS program. She limited the number of projects she appeared in and retired from acting in 2011.
“It’s not in my nature to slow down, but I have to,” she said Brain & Life Magazine 2005. “Stress and anxiety and all that high tension stuff is not good for MS.”
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