She was born in 1944 and started dancing ballet at an early age, which led to a career as a go-go dancer. Her first film role came in the Elvis Presley film "Viva Las Vegas" and thereafter she made five more Elvis films as a dancer.
Soon she got roles as a "confused blonde" in, for example, Mel Brooks' "The Producers", where she plays the assistant Inga. But she also played Richard Dreyfuss' wife in Steven Spielberg's "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" and was Oscar-nominated for her role as Dustin Hoffman's colleague in "Tootsie".
In an interview in 2008, she said that she often got to play "the suffering wife".
They don't write roles where a woman gets to be smart, funny or quick-witted. They write roles where women get walked all over and that's the kind of women I play.
In later years, she played, among other things, Phoebe Buffay's mother in "Friends". Among others, Tina Fey has stated that Teri Garr was a role model as a funny woman in TV and film during the 1970s and 80s.
Garr was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, MS, in 2002 and, according to her family, passed away at the age of 79 due to complications from the disease.
