Friends and Costars Reminisce on Famed TV Actress Mary Tyler Moore

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Jan 25, 2017 5:48 pm·

By Tiffany White

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The actress "who could turn the world on with a smile," Mary Tyler Moore, died today at the age of 80. To remember the iconic TV star, we looked back at what friends, family, and costars have said about her throughout the years.

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Click through the gallery to see heartwarming quotes about Mary Tyler Moore.

1 of 10

Carl Reiner

"She can do it all: act, sing, dance, and melt the hardest of hearts," he said in 2012.

2 of 10

Betty White

"Mary and I have been very close friends for many years," she said in 2012. "It was such fun working with her. Mary has a way, even with one line or one word she can just take a scene. She's such a pro — and her manners are impeccable."

3 of 10

Robert Redford

"Once while renting a house in Malibu, California, I saw her bundled up, walking alone on the beach," he said. "I wanted to introduce myself and walk along with her, but my respect for other people's privacy prevented it. The Mary Tyler Moore Show is the only network show I consistently watch, aside from Sesame Street. She seems at once positive, vivacious, vulnerable, attractive, independent, adventurous and feminine. I would still like to walk with her on the beach."

4 of 10

Gerald Rafshoon

"There are very few people who don't bring any negatives with them. In fact, she's about it," he said.

5 of 10

Rose Marie

"She was a very ambitious girl," she said. "She came on, the first day of the set, and said, “I’m going to have my own company, called MTM. And I’m going to have a little pussycat instead of a lion. And I looked at her, and I said, “This is a first show. This is a pilot. We don’t even know whether this is gonna go.” You know. But she was very ambitious. And she accomplished what she wanted to accomplish."

6 of 10

John Amos

"The joy of working with Mary was, you knew who the star of the show was," he said. "It was The Mary Tyler Moore Show. So there were no attempts to upstage her, or any of the other things that usually go with actors surrounding the star. It was a harmonious set… It was a wonderful atmosphere. I felt, for the first time, that I was part of a real, meaningful ensemble."

7 of 10

Dick Van Dyke

“She was just beautiful,” he said. “She had this strange mid-Atlantic accent, kind of like Katherine Hepburn… We had … like a teenage crush on each other. It was fun.”

8 of 10

Ed Asner

"I learned from her by osmosis all the time," he said. "She gesticulated more than I did. She was tremendously generous. She never resorted to backbiting, never a complaint, never an untoward word. She accepted the facts and foibles of everybody and left it to others to straighten out those who needed to fly right. She was inordinately prompt. All of us had tremendous stage experience. She probably had less. But she was a workaholic."

9 of 10

Jeane Dixon

"Mary will mount to even more scintillating heights and will become one of the first ladies of the American theater."

10 of 10

Valerie Harper

"We really became friends. I love Mary and I loved her from the beginning," said actress Valerie Harper, who met Moore at an audition and later played Rhoda on "The Mary Tyler Moore Show."

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