"How will you make it on your own?," the theme song asked a "girl," played by Mary Tyler Moore. "This world is awfully big." She made it, after all.
"Today, beloved icon, Mary Tyler Moore, passed away at the age of 80 in the company of friends and her loving husband of over 33 years, Dr. S. Robert Levine," her rep said in a statement.
From the Hollywood Reporter:
She starred on 'The Dick Van Dyke Show' and on her eponymous sitcom, two of most acclaimed comedies ever, then acted against type to earn an Oscar nom for 'Ordinary People.'
Mary Tyler Moore, whose roles as a perky housewife on The Dick Van Dyke Show in the 1960s and as a spunky, single working woman in her eponymous '70s sitcom made her America's sweetheart, has died, her rep Mara Buxbaum confirmed to The Hollywood Reporter. She was 80.
Moore played opposite her TV persona and received an Oscar nomination for her performance as an icy mother struggling to connect with her son in Robert Redford's best-picture winner Ordinary People (1980).
The six-time Emmy Award winner had elective surgery in May 2012 to remove what is known as a meningioma, or benign tumor of the lining tissue of her brain.
Moore starred opposite Dick Van Duke as suburban stay-at-home mom Laura Petrie from 1961-66, then played Mary Richards — a hard-luck loser in love who moves across the state to Minneapolis and gets a job at local TV station WJM for the 6 o'clock news — from 1970-77.
The latter represented a bold move for a series' main character to be an independent, never-married woman, and Moore became an icon for the feminist movement.
