Dick Van Dyke & Mary Tyler Moore: The Premiere Sitcom Stars of the '60s and '70s - Paperback

by Charles River (Author)

*Includes pictures
*Includes the stars' quotes about their lives and careers
*Includes a bibliography for further reading

"I wanted to be Stan Laurel, then I wanted to be Fred Astaire and then Captain Kangaroo. I actually started out as a radio announcer when I was 17 and never left the business, so that's literally 70 years." - Dick Van Dyke

"I'm Mary Tyler Moore and I am...an actress, an animal lover, the chairman of the Juvenile diabetes Research Foundation, the wife of Dr. Robert Levine...Suffice it to say there are a lot of ways to end that sentence, and I don't think I've come close to living through all the possibilities, thank heavens. But what I do know is that in every role I am a devotee of laughter and tears, committed to expressing the nuances of each." - Mary Tyler Moore

If television was still coming into its own during the 1950s, it truly became a national phenomenon across America in the 1960s, and in an era where most Americans finally owned a television, one of the most popular shows on the air was The Dick Van Dyke Show. The show starred Van Dyke as a middle class writer who worked on a television show, and it also helped catapult Mary Tyler Moore (who played his wife) to superstardom and her own hit show, The Mary Tyler Moore Show.

To this day, it is widely considered one of the greatest television shows in history, and Dick Van Dyke remains best known for it, but the show was merely the peak of a career that had already proven quite versatile. Van Dyke had long aspired to be in show business and even a television show host long before television was popular, and he got his start as a radio DJ when he was still in his early 20s. Always a fan of comedy, Van Dyke parlayed that into a comedy gig, and he then rode the success of his comedic performances to starring roles on Broadway. Van Dyke's skills and versatility ultimately helped make him a good choice to star in a television show in 1961, thus spawning the show that took his name.

If anything, Mary Tyler Moore is now better known than Van Dyke, in part because her show was one of the most popular and influential shows of the '70s. Moore's show was the first mainstream television program to portray a single woman more focused on her job than her domestic life. Geoff Hammill wrote of the show, "As Mary Richards, a single woman in her thirties, Moore presented a character different from other single TV women of the time. She was not widowed or divorced or seeking a man to support her." Moore's show was so critically acclaimed that it won dozens of Emmy awards, holding a record for the most Emmy awards for nearly 25 years, and it was recently ranked one of the best shows of all time by the Writers Guild of America.

The shows made Moore a superstar, and it's no surprise that she never had another show nearly as praised as the ones that brought her fame, but she had a long and storied career across TV, film, and Broadway. She has also participated in numerous charity endeavors and remains an activist well into her 70s.