Anne Meara, the Emmy- and Tony-nominated comedian long paired personally and professionally with Jerry Stiller and the mother of actor-director Ben Stiller, died Saturday, her husband and son told the Associated Press. She was 85.
No further details have been revealed. A statement released to the AP said Jerry Stiller was Meara's "husband and partner in life." The statement added, "The two were married for 61 years and worked together almost as long."
Stiller and Meara were a top comedy act in the 1960s, appearing on "The Ed Sullivan Show" 36 times. The two were members of the improv group the Compass Players, which later became Second City.
Although Meara had converted to Judaism when the couple got married, Stiller & Meara's material centered on the differences in their ethnic backgrounds, epitomized by their signature "Hershey Horowitz/Mary Elizabeth Doyle" routines.
In 2010 the couple had their own Yahoo comedy series, "Stiller & Meara," produced in part by son Ben.
But Meara was also a serious dramatic actress who received a 1993 Tony nomination for featured actress in a play for her work in Eugene O'Neill's "Anna Christie," which starred Liam Neeson and Natasha Richardson. She also penned a couple of plays that made it to Off Broadway.
She was also well known for recurring on daytime soap "All My Children" from 1993-98 as Peggy Moody; for her work on "Archie Bunker's Place," for which she received two of her four Emmy nominations; and for her bravura performance as the indefatigable suburban mother in Greg Mottola's 1997 indie "The Daytrippers." In that film, Hope Davis plays a woman who can't get her husband, who's in Manhattan, on the phone, whereupon her mother, played by Meara, puts the suburban family in the station wagon to begin an antic search for him in the city.
Roger Ebert said: Meara is "almost by definition, superb at her assignment here, which is to create an insufferable mother. The film's problem is that she does it so well."