Entertainment Desk: Mary Tyler Moore, the star of TV's beloved "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" whose comic realism helped revolutionize the depiction of women on the small screen, died Wednesday. She was 80.
Moore gained fame in the 1960s as the frazzled wife Laura Petrie on "The Dick Van Dyke Show." In the 1970s, she created one of TV's first career-woman sitcom heroines in "The Mary Tyler Moore Show."
She won seven Emmy awards over the years and was nominated for an Oscar for her 1980 portrayal of an affluent mother whose son is accidentally killed in "Ordinary People."
Moore's first major TV role was on the classic sitcom "The Dick Van Dyke Show," in which she played the young homemaker wife of Van Dyke's character, comedy writer Rob Petrie, from 1961-66.
Laura was a dream wife and mother, but not perfect.
Viewers identified with her flustered moments and her protracted, plaintive cry to her husband: "Ohhhh, Robbbb!"
In her 1995 autobiography "After All," Moore admitted she helped her terminally ill brother try to commit suicide by feeding him ice cream laced with a deadly overdose of drugs. The attempt failed, and her 47-year-old brother, John, died three months later in 1992 of kidney cancer.
In 1983, Moore married cardiologist Robert Levine, who survives her. Her marriage to Tinker lasted from 1962 to 1981. Before that, she was married to Dick Meeker from 1955 to 1961.
In 1992, Moore received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. A decade later, a life-size bronze statue went on display in Minneapolis, depicting her tossing her trademark tam into the air as she did in the opening credits of "The Mary Tyler Moore Show."