There was such a ping in it, an excitement, a reality to it.” They soon discovered her gift for comedy. She read three lines, three simple lines. Creator Carl Reiner remembers, “I read about 60 girls, and I read the whole script with them. A failed audition to play the older daughter on “The Danny Thomas Show” led to her being called for “Van Dyke,” of which Thomas was an executive producer. (A visible pregnancy ended that job.) She played a faceless switchboard operator on “Richard Diamond, Private Detective,” from which she was bounced when she asked for more money, and a typical assortment of starlet roles in television and movies. She trained as a dancer, and right out of high school played a pixie, Happy Hotpoint, in a series of appliance commercials. Moore was driven to perform from an early age, which she relates to wanting to impress her father - though that seems too simple. Were it titled simply “Being Mary,” there’d be little doubt who was meant. Although Moore proved herself as an actress of depth and range and peerless comic timing again and again, on the small and big screen and onstage, “The Dick Van Dyke Show” and “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” made her a star, and incidentally a cultural figurehead, and are the reason we have a splendid new documentary, “Being Mary Tyler Moore,” premiering Friday on HBO. But the smile was her own, and it worked magic across two situation comedies that described their time in a way that some might have regarded as ahead of their time. To be precise, it’s Mary Richards, a person Moore played. “Who can turn the world on with her smile?” It’s Mary Tyler Moore, of course, and you should know it.
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