![]() If your heart doesn’t stop beating and you stay up with it, look what happens,” she said backstage at the Creative Arts Emmy Awards. The late 1990s brought on the grandmother roles in sitcoms such as “Thanks,” “The Ellen Show” and “Touched by an Angel.” She won another Emmy Award in 2002 for playing the irascible granny Ida on Fox’s “Malcolm in the Middle” and made history in 2006 when she won again as guest actress, becoming the winningest female performer in Emmy history. She appeared in “Going to the Chapel,” 1990’s “Love Hurts,” “The Beverly Hillbillies” movie and “Now and Then,” stretching her repertoire in 1994 with a one-woman show called “Joy Ride: The True Story of Grandma Moses,” playing the legendary farm wife who started painting late in life. She teamed up with Brooks again on “History of the World: Part I” before making a prominent return to television in 1986 when she replaced Charlotte Rae in NBC’s long-running sitcom “The Facts of Life.” Returning to prime-time television, she said, was like “falling backwards into a warm bath.” So she penciled in a light mustache, added extra shoulder padding, raised the costume’s torpedo-shaped breasts to just below her chin, and talked out of the side of her mouth - an effect that even gave the notoriously zany Brooks pause. ![]() In Brooks’ 1977 Hitchcock spoof “High Anxiety,” Leachman recalled arriving on set to play the psychiatric ward overseer Nurse Diesel with concern that she was simply expected to reprise Blücher’s ridiculous Eastern European accent and stern countenance. “Cloris’ genius is that she never plays comedy for laughs. “That was a great choice,” the director told The Times in 2004. The actress notched several Broadway credits in the 1940s and ‘50s, sang for Rodgers and Hammerstein and gained success in theater starring opposite Katharine Hepburn in “As You Like It.” She used the money to fund her move to New York and study voice and drama at the Actors Studio. She played part of the Grieg piano concerto as her talent offering and placed in the top five, earning a $1,000-scholarship. Leachman earned the Miss Chicago title and competed in Miss America in 1946. “My mother told me to walk straight and sparkle plenty,” Leachman told the Hollywood Reporter in 2016. But academics overwhelmed her and she left school abruptly to work the pageant circuit - a move, she later said, that “seemed rather stupid.” She had a radio talk show and acted at the community playhouse, which earned her a scholarship to study drama at Northwestern University and become a classical pianist. Her family couldn’t afford a piano but she taught herself the instrument anyway by practicing on a cardboard drawing of piano keys. Her mother encouraged her in the arts, but more for pleasure than for gain. “You never knew what Cloris was going to say or do, and that unpredictable quality was part of her unparalleled magic.” With a single look she had the ability to break your heart or make you laugh till the tears ran down your face,” said Juliet Green, Leachman’s manager. “It’s been my privilege to work with Cloris Leachman, one of the most fearless actresses of our time. Leachman, who worked well into her 90s and became the oldest contestant on “Dancing With the Stars” in 2008, died Tuesday evening of natural causes, her publicist said. ![]() The ubiquitous actress always seemed to be working: She anchored her own “MTM” spinoff series “Phyllis” and starred in the hit TV shows “The Facts of Life,” “Rhoda,” “Touched by an Angel,” “The Ellen Show,” “Malcolm in the Middle,” and “Raising Hope.” She had a recurring role on “American Gods” in 2016 and a critically acclaimed career in film, highlighted by her Oscar-winning performance in 1971’s “The Last Picture Show” and the classic tour-de-farce “Young Frankenstein.” Cloris Leachman, who won an Oscar for her role in the bleak coming-of-age movie “The Last Picture Show” and Emmy awards during a prolific television career that stretched back to “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” has died at her home in Encinitas, Calif.
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