Meara, Meara

Comedians/actors Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara were married for 61 years, but had they not heeded warning signs, the marriage might have ended some 44 years ago.

The comedy team of Stiller & Meara was seemingly cruising along in 1970, having just enjoyed a nice run of 36 appearances on "The Ed Sullivan Show" in the 1960s, when both members of the team/marriage sensed that something was amiss.

With an act based largely on their real-life domestic trials and tribulations, Stiller and Meara found that despite their success---or maybe because of it---the line between life at home and life on stage was getting further blurred as the years went on.

"I didn't know where the act ended and our marriage began," Meara told People magazine in 1977.

"We were like two guys," Stiller said in the same article.

With Meara questioning things and Stiller worried that he might lose his wife, the act was disbanded in 1970.

But they never stopped working together for very long at any given time; they just didn't do so as the stage act Stiller & Meara.

The couple had been teaming up on a web series in recent years before Anne Meara passed away over the weekend. She was 85.

On television, Stiller and Meara were most recently seen sharing some scenes together on "The King of Queens," with Stiller playing Carrie Heffernan's widowed father Arthur Spooner and Meara playing the part of Veronica Olchin, the widowed mother of Doug Heffernan's friend Spence Olchin.

Ironically, that series ended with Stiller and Meara's characters getting married.

Stiller and Meara's actor/producer/director son, Ben Stiller, produced the web series for Red Hour Digital, which Ben owns.



Anne Meara met Jerry Stiller in New York after a failed audition in 1953, and the couple was married a year later. But it took much prodding and several years of convincing before Meara agreed to join her husband on stage as a comedy team, whose only rival at the time in the male/female duo category was the team of Elaine May and Mike Nichols, who weren't married.

Thus, Stiller & Meara would eventually become the entertainment industry's longest-running, most successful husband and wife comedy duo, surpassing that of George Burns and Gracie Allen.

After the stage "breakup" in 1970, Stiller and Meara hardly disappeared from view or from listeners' ears.

They did radio ads for Blue Nun wine, and appeared in television commercials together. They also teamed up in 1977-78 for "Take Five with Stiller & Meara," which was a series consisting of humorous blackouts about everyday life.

Meara was no Gracie Allen, and that's hardly a knock. Where Allen was George Burns' ditzy foil, Anne Meara was Jerry Stiller's equal, and then some---both physically and in terms of material. She was a tall, Irish, Brooklyn redhead whose height caused her to loom large on stage next to her husband, literally and figuratively.

Meara was a four-time Emmy Award nominee and she was nominated for a Tony Award once.

There was so much more to Anne Meara than being Jerry Stiller's comedy partner---and Ben Stiller's mother. There was the acting and the writing and the teaching and the trailblazing aspect to her career for other female comics.

Not bad for a woman whose own mother committed suicide when she was 11 years old.

Meara once gave a glimpse into what the secret was to staying married to a co-worker for over six decades, practically unheard of in show business.

"Was it love at first sight? It wasn't then---but it sure is now."

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Life, Interrupted

Murder in the Backyard

A Hodak Moment