Cloris Leachman (born April 30, 1926) is an American actress of stage, film and TV. Born in Des Moines, Iowa, the eldest of five sisters, she majored in drama at Northwestern University. She is a member of Gamma Phi Beta Sorority. One of her classmates at Northwestern was future comic actor Paul Lynde. Leachman began appearing on television and in films shortly following a run for Miss America as Miss Chicago (1946).
Leachman has won numerous awards during her lengthy career. In 1978 she earned the Sarah Siddons Award for her work in Chicago theatre. She won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress in 1971's The Last Picture Show, based on the bestselling book by Larry McMurtry. She has also won seven primetime and one daytime Emmy Awards and been nominated 20 times for her work in television over the years, most notably as the character of neighbor/landlady/nosy friend Phyllis Lindstrom on the Mary Tyler Moore.
The character was a fixture on the Mary Tyler Moore program for five years; she left Minneapolis in 1975 for a spinoff series, Phyllis for which she garnered a Golden Globe. In 1986, she returned to television, replacing Charlotte Rae as the den mother on The Facts of Life. Leachman's role, playing Rae's sister, Beverly Ann Stickle, could not save the aging series and it was canceled two years later.
Currently, she plays embittered, greedy, Canadian "Grandma Ida" on the Fox series Malcolm in the Middle. Other 2005 television credits include starring in the successful Lifetime Television mini-series Beach Girls with Rob Lowe and Julia Ormond. She received two Outstanding Guest Actress primetime Emmy nominations in 2005 including a fifth nomination for Malcolm in the Middle for comedy and a nod for the CBS drama Joan of Arcadia.
In 2005, she was nominated for a SAG Award for her role as the wine-soaked, former jazz singer and grandmother "Evelyn" in the Sony feature Spanglish opposite Adam Sandler and Tea Leoni. She had replaced an ailing Anne Bancroft in the role. The same year, she appeared in the big screen features The Longest Yard, and Sky High. In 2006, she will star with Sir Ben Kingsley and Annette Bening in the HBO special Mrs. Harris.
She was married for several years to Hollywood impresario George Englund, with whom she had four sons and one daughter; one of her sons was previously married to Sharon Stone, making Leachman Stone's mother-in-law. The Englunds suffered the loss of one of their sons from a drug overdose in the 1980s. The couple divorced (reportedly due to Englund's affair with Joan Collins) and Ms. Leachman has never remarried. Leachman and Englund maintained close friendships over the years with Marlon Brando, Burgess Meredith, and a myriad of Tinseltown's "A" list.
Leachman and her ex-husband have several grandchildren. Ms. Leachman is a longtime resident of Pacific Palisades, California; she is a neighbour of actress/comedienne Bea Arthur, but they are not close friends. On a recent episode of Family Guy, Peter Griffin imagines what he would do with a million dollars, and pictures himself legally purchasing and owning Cloris Leachman.