Mary Tyler Moore Played a Grieving Mother. Then Her Only Son Died.

For twenty years, America watched her hold everything together. Laura Petrie, the bright young wife in New Rochelle. Mary Richards, the single woman who made it on her own in Minneapolis, throwing her hat into the air on a cold downtown street. She was the one who always found a way to manage. In September of nineteen eighty, she took a role nobody expected her to take. In Ordinary People, she played Beth Jarrett, a mother who has lost a son and will not let anyone see her grieve. It was the first and only Oscar nomination of her career. The film opened on the nineteenth of September. Twenty-five days later, her own son was dead at twenty-four. Before the year was out, she had filed for divorce. Less than four years after that, she checked herself into the Betty Ford Center. And there was something else the audience never saw. At thirty-three, the same age she was when Mary Richards first went on the air, she was told she had type one diabetes, and she kept it quiet for years because she was afraid of what it would do to her career. This is the story of what it cost her to be the woman everyone wanted to be. Thank you for watching all the way to the end. If this meant something to you, subscribe and turn on the bell, so you will be here for the next one. #MaryTylerMoore #ClassicTV #OrdinaryPeople #TVHistory #SeventiesTV ``` mary tyler moore, mary tyler moore show, mary richards, laura petrie, dick van dyke show, ordinary people 1980, mary tyler moore son, richard meeker jr, mary tyler moore diabetes, grant tinker, mtm enterprises, classic tv, classic television, seventies tv, 1970s television, sixties tv, mary tyler moore biography, mary tyler moore life story, mary tyler moore death, old hollywood, tv legends, beth jarrett, robert redford ordinary people, valerie harper, ed asner, ted knight, gavin macleod, betty ford center, mary tyler moore documentary, celebrity biography, american television history