Mary Tyler Moore became America’s sweetheart by sharing overwhelming joy with everyone who watched her radiant sitcom characters. But her most courageous act was publicly sharing her deep, lifelong pain.
As tributes for Moore — who died Wednesday at 80 — pour in, much will be celebrated: how she forever altered the television landscape, became a “symbol of women’s liberation” and even inspired a generation of journalists.
These are important parts of her life. But by her own accounts, so were her struggles with diabetes, alcoholism and loss, about which she remained hopeful, humble, grateful and ultimately remarkably candid. She exposed her own dark clouds in two memoirs and countless interviews in the hope she could help others.
Alcohol permeated nearly every aspect of Moore’s life, from her two failed marriages to the premature deaths of her sister and her son. In her memoir “Growing Up Again,” she attributed her subtly “off-center and uneven features” to being a child of an alcoholic mother.