Movie fans and Hollywood legends alike are mourning beloved actress Terri Gar, known for her role in the comedy classic Young Frankenstein.

Director Mel Brooks paid tribute to the 79-year-old actress, who died from multiple sclerosis. She had her breakout role in Young Frankenstein as Inga, the assistant to Gene Wilder's Dr. Frederick Frankenstein.

Mel Brooks mourning

In a statement on X, Brooks called Garr "so talented and so funny."

"So very sorry to hear about Teri Garr’s passing,” he wrote on X. “She was so talented and so funny. Her humor and lively spirit made the YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN set a pleasure to work on. Her ‘German’ accent had us all in stitches! She will be greatly missed.”

Garr trained as a ballot dancer in her youth, first appearing in Elvis movies like 1964's Viva Las Vegas. She landed her first speaking role in the Monkees' movie Head (1968), written by Jack Nicholson. She also appeared in an episode of Star Trek that year.

Her career launched with the role of Inga in Brooks's horror spoof, where she uttered memorable lines like "Vould you like to have a roll in ze hay?” Garr, a regular on The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour at the time, borrowed the German accent from Cher's wig lady.

Over the course of her prolific career, Garr continued to win praise for her lively acting, earning an Oscar nod for Tootsie (1982).

She also appeared in the comedy favorite Dumb and Dumber (1994), Stephen Spielberg's sci-fi classic Close Encounters of The Third Kind (1977) and Francis Ford Coppola's thriller The Conversation (1974), among others.

Beloved actor battled disease

Known for her effervescent wit, Garr was also a fixture on TV, making regular appearances on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson and Late Night With David Letterman. 

Sadly, Garr's career was impacted by health challenges. She was diagnosed in the 1990s with multiple sclerosis, a chronic disease of the central nervous system, and went public with the news on CNN in 2002.

"In my mind, it was all going according to plan. But it ain’t always so, is it?" she later wrote in her memoir.

"My body had a trick or two up its sleeve," she went on. "A stumble here, a tingling finger there. I was trained as a dancer and knew better than to indulge the random aches and pains that visited now and then. Being a successful Hollywood actress may be challenging, but little did I know that the very body that had always been my calling card would betray me.”

Garr became an advocate for people with MS, serving as a national ambassador for the National Multiple Sclerosis Society.

She suffered a brain aneurysm in 2006 and recovered, but her health issues drove her to retirement in 2011.