Comedy team Meara met actor-comedian
Jerry Stiller in 1953, and they married soon after. Until he suggested it, she had never thought of doing comedy. "Jerry started us being a comedy team," she said. "He always thought I would be a great comedy partner." They also added a new twist to their comedy act, he adds, by sometimes playing up the fact that Stiller was Jewish and Meara was Catholic. After Nichols and May broke up as a team in 1961, Stiller and Meara were the number-one couple comedy team by the late 1960s. And as
Mike Nichols and
Elaine May were not married, Stiller and Meara became the most famous married couple comedy team since
Burns and Allen. and other TV programs, including
The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. They released their first LP in 1963, ''Presenting America's New Comedy Sensation: Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara Live at The
Hungry I'', which became a hit. By 1970, however, they broke up their act because it was affecting their marriage: "I didn't know where the act ended and our marriage began," complained Meara in 1977. She had a recurring role on the sitcom
Rhoda as airline stewardess Sally Gallagher, one of the title character's best friends. She had roles as Mrs. Curry in
The Boys from Brazil (1978) and as Mrs. Sherwood in
Fame (1980). In the 1970s, she provided narration for segments of the educational television series
Sesame Street consisting of scenes from silent films. and Meara in an episode of
The Corner Bar, 1973 Meara co-starred with
Carroll O'Connor (with whom she had appeared onstage off-Broadway many years earlier in
Ulysses in Nighttown) and
Martin Balsam in the early 1980s hit sitcom ''
Archie Bunker's Place, which was a continuation of the influential 1970s sitcom All in the Family''. She played Veronica Rooney, the bar's cook, for the show's first three seasons (1979–1982). During that time, she acted in the movie
Fame (1980), in which she played English teacher Elizabeth Sherwood. She appeared as Dorothy Halligan Deaver, the grandmother, in the TV series
ALF in the late 1980s.
The Stiller and Meara Show, her own 1986 TV sitcom, in which Stiller played the deputy mayor of New York City and Meara portrayed his wife, a television commercial actress, was unsuccessful. From 1999 to 2007, Meara guest starred in
The King of Queens (where her husband played
Arthur Spooner), first as Mary Finnegan, then as Veronica Olchin (mother of
Spence, who was played by
Patton Oswalt). Veronica and Arthur were married in
the series finale. In her later years, she had a recurring role in
Sex and the City (as Mary Brady), and appeared in two episodes of
Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. Starting in October 2010, Meara and Jerry Stiller began starring in a
Yahoo! web series called
Stiller & Meara produced by
Red Hour Digital, a production company owned by their son
Ben Stiller. In 2011, she accepted a role in the
off-Broadway play
Love, Loss, and What I Wore with
Conchata Ferrell,
AnnaLynne McCord,
Minka Kelly, and
B. Smith.
Writing and consulting In 1995, Meara wrote the comedy
After-Play, which became an off-Broadway production. In 2009, Meara wrote her personal life reflections in a New York-focused online blog titled ''Mr. Beller's Neighborhood -- New York City Stories''. In it, Meara recalled her mother's death and her childhood experiences at Catholic boarding school. == Personal life ==