Valerie Harper

Valerie Harper
Harper at a 2007 SAG Foundation brunch
Born	Valerie Kathryn Harper (1939-08-22) August 22, 1939 (age 77) Suffern, New York, U.S.
Occupation	Actress
Years active	1959–present
Spouse(s)	Richard Schaal (1964–78) Tony Cacciotti (1987–present; 1 child)
Website	Official website

Valerie Kathryn Harper (born August 22, 1939) is an American actress.

She is best known for her roles as Rhoda Morgenstern in the 1970s television series The Mary Tyler Moore Show and its spin-off, Rhoda, and later as Valerie Hogan in Valerie. She is a four-time Primetime Emmy Award winner. Her notable film roles include Freebie and the Bean (1974), and Chapter Two (1979), both of which garnered her Golden Globe Award nominations.

Harper is also known for her stage work, having appeared in several Broadway productions. She started her career as a dancer on Broadway, making her debut in the musical Take Me Along in 1959. In 2010, she was nominated for the Tony Award for Best Actress in a Play for her performance as Talullah Bankhead in the play Looped.

Harper was born in Suffern, New York, the daughter of Iva Mildred (née McConnell; 1910—1988) and Howard Donald Harper. Her father was a lighting salesman, and her mother was born in Canada and trained as a nurse. She is the middle child of three siblings. She has an older sister, Leah; a younger brother, Merrill (who later took the name "Don") and a half-sister, Virginia, from her father's second marriage.

She claims her parents were expecting a boy and after her arrival, her first and middle names derived from that year's women's doubles tennis champions, Valerie Scott and Kay Stammers. She is of French, English, Irish, Scottish, and Welsh ancestry. Harper claims to have based her future character Rhoda Morgenstern on her Italian stepmother, Angela Posillico, and Penny Ann Green (née Joanna Greenberg), with whom she danced in the Broadway musical Wildcat. She was raised Catholic, although at an early age she "quit" the church.