Valerie Harper

[DTravel]

Born: August 22, 1939 in Suffern, New York, USA
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0001320/

Valerie Harper - The Muppet Show (Season 1 Ep 20, 1976) SD caps x81

81 screen caps of Valerie Harper as herself from The Muppet Show, Season 1, Episode 21 (1976). (Note: The episodes are on the DVD sets in their production order which was not the same as their broadcast order. I will follow the DVDs numbering, i.e. production order.)

(We miss you, Jim Henson. )

Copyright acknowledgment:

[gregj1967]

LIFE magazine has recently opened their archives and has made millions of photos--many never published--available to the public through Google.
(link: http://images.google.com/hosted/life )

[Sam Spade]

Scrubs up quite well.

[The Wolf Man]

[COP11]

[johnbear]

[Findcandor]

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Originally Posted by COP11

A beautiful portrait, from
two posts above.

It was good of Member "DTravel" to begin this thread honoring Valerie Harper in 2008 — where he added, "We miss you, Jim Henson." Here we are fourteen years later, and unfortunately, another to be missed is the one the thread is devoted to. She died three years ago, on August 30, 2019.


Thanks to Gregj1967's Post #2.

For those who remember The Mary Tyler Moore Show and its spin-off, Rhoda, Valerie Harper absolutely came across as extremely attractive. Her mascara was on the heavy side and (it seems) she always hid her body under tons of clothing, but the fact is, Valerie was a beautiful woman. Yet since she was thought of as a "funny girl," it was difficult to place the very talented Ms. Harper in the ranks of the pretty ones. Perhaps this serves as one reason why this thread contains only six posts, before I butted in.

The last thing I had in mind was to prepare a post on Valerie Harper, but this post I just finished led me to seek a movie that Valerie happened to appear in. I wanted to do a "quickie," even though the TV-film (Death of A Cheerleader) is from 1994, and did not feature the fifty five year old Valerie in her prime. Yet her good looks were still in evidence, for a middle-aged lady (note she took it easy on the eye make-up). Let's get these out of the way:



That was supposed to be it, but once I noticed how this thread was so modest, I had second thoughts. Besides, it didn't seem right to let things go with "over the hill" Valerie. So I dug up two examples of Valerie's works, when she was at the top of her fame.



Valerie was riding high in 1974, the year her hit series, Rhoda, began. She went theatrical with Freebie and the Bean in that year, some posters of which (as seen below) made sure to inject Valerie, even though her part of "Consuelo" was that of Bean's wife, and relatively minor. In other words, she was a hot property, and called to be exploited.



In 1972, she was in the "The Most Crucial Game" episode of Columbo, although not onscreen extensively; the villain was Robert Culp. Here, the actress was thirty three.




Yet given how her comedic side was often at the forefront, she had the chance to play a damsel in distress, in the 1977 TV film (and well done, as far as TV films go) Night Terror.



A mute killer (played menacingly by Richard Romanus) shoots a cop, Valerie is a witness, and the chase is on.


.................................................. ..... Look, some Valerie skin!





What's that I see in the first two shots below? More correctly, what's that that I don't see?




I remember catching Valerie while she was a contestant on Dancing with the Stars, which took place nearly a decade ago (when the lady was seventy-four). She was a delight; at one point, becoming aware of one of the hunks got the better of her, and she blurted out that she knew she was married, but...



She also mentioned she had cancer, which was saddening. (A YouTube memory, and an article which quoted her as saying at the time, "It's good to be alive... and it's even better to be dancing.") Luckily, she would go on for another six years (and hopefully did not suffer).

Of course she was a crowd favorite, and feelings went beyond the sympathy. We are living in times when everyone is a "star," and it was pleasing to feature a personality (unlike many of the other contestants from "Dancing with the So-Called Stars") that lived up to the word.






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