Valerie Harper (Harper Valerie)

Early TV-comedy influences included Lucille Ball, Jackie Gleason, Joan Davis, Your Show of Shows, and, later, Mary Tyler Moore in The Dick Van Dyke Show. She attended at Lincoln High School in Jersey City, and finished high school at the private Young Professionals School on West 56th Street, where classmates included Sal Mineo, Barbara Dana, Tuesday Weld, and Carol Lynley. She has been married to Tony Cacciotti since 1987.[citation needed]

She can be seen as an extra in rock-and-roll promo films that featured such artists as Frankie Lymon and The Teenagers.[citation needed] In 2001, she starred in the Broadway production of Charles Busch's The Tale of the Allergist's Wife.[citation needed] Harper returned to Broadway in February 2010 starring as Tallulah Bankhead in Matthew Lombardo's Looped at the Lyceum Theatre.

She was also nominated for a Golden Globe for "New Star of the Year" for her role in 1974's Freebie and The Bean. Harper was one of the first guest stars on The Muppet Show in its first season.[citation needed]

Harper has worked almost exclusively in theater and television, but did have key supporting roles in Neil Simon's Chapter Two in 1979 and Stanley Donen's Blame It on Rio (1984) opposite Michael Caine. She has had roles in TV movies and guest spots on a number of series, including Melrose Place in 1998 and Sex and the City in 1999. Also in the 1990s, she advocated hormone replacement therapy for Eli Lilly and Company.

In 2007, Harper portrayed Golda Meir in a national tour of the one-woman Broadway drama Golda's Balcony.[citation needed] She also released a film version of the show.[citation needed]

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