Short Biography

Valerie Harper (born August 22, 1940) is an American actress, best known for her role as Rhoda Morgenstern on the 1970s television show The Mary Tyler Moore Show, and its spin-off, Rhoda. Harper was born in Suffern, New York at Good Samaritan Hospital in Rockland County, New York, to a mixed Catholic/Lutheran family. Her mother, Iva (née McConnell), was a nurse, and her father, Howard Harper, was a sales executive. She was reared in Oregon. She has been married to Tony Cacciotti since 1987.

Harper began as a dancer/chorus girl on Broadway in the late 1950s and early 1960s in such shows such as Take Me Along and Subways Are For Sleeping, as well as Wildcat, in which she performed with Lucille Ball. She can be seen as an extra in rock-and roll promo films that featured such artists as "Frankie Lymon and The Teenagers". In 2001, she returned to the Broadway stage to replace Linda Lavin in The Tale of the Allergist`s Wife. She also appeared in bit parts in several films beginning with Li`l Abner (1959), when she was a teenager. During the late 1960s, however, Harper worked somewhat less, though she appeared in Carl Reiner`s play Something Different in 1968. She also wrote an episode of Love, American Style with her then-husband, actor/writer, Richard Schaal, whose daughter, actress Wendy Schaal (who voices "Francine Smith" on American Dad), was her stepdaughter. Things changed when Harper got the role of the wise-cracking yet vulnerable uber-Jewish New Yorker, Rhoda Morgenstern, on the landmark CBS 1970 TV sitcom The Mary Tyler Moore Show. She was a series regular from 1970-74, then starred in her own spin-off series Rhoda from 1974-78. Both series were ratings hits and she won four Emmy awards and a Golden Globe for her work as Rhoda Morgenstern throughout this period...

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