Comedienne, actress Anne Meara dies at 85

Anne Meara, who rose to stardom with her husband, Jerry Stiller, portraying what People magazine called “anxiety comedy’s top couple,” died Saturday in New York City. She was 85.

Her death was confirmed by publicist Kelly Bush, who represents actor Ben Stiller, one of Meara’s two children. No further details were provided.

The stand-up act known as Stiller and Meara came to prominence in the 1960s, with the couple performing 36 times on “The Ed Sullivan Show.”

Though they later collaborated on TV shows and commercials – most notably a series of funny spots for a white wine called Blue Nun – the two mostly followed separate professional paths.

Jerry Stiller became known for his TV work as George Costanza’s volatile father on “Seinfeld” and as the eccentric dad Arthur Spooner on the comedy “The King of Queens.” Meara received five Emmy nominations for her character roles on several TV shows, including her stint as Veronica, the cook on “Archie Bunker’s Place.” She performed in films and wrote plays that centered on couples as witty and down-to-earth as Stiller and herself.

In their act, they used gentle ethnic humor to highlight the differences that drew them together.

She and Stiller were married 60 years before her death.

When they met in 1953, they were both in New York looking for work. She burst out of his agent’s office in tears after the man chased her around his desk.

In his 2000 memoir, “Married to Laughter,” Stiller wrote that he took the upset, “angel-faced” young woman to a coffee shop, where she bemoaned the lecherous men of New York.

Born Sept. 20, 1929, in Brooklyn, Meara was the only child of attorney Edward Joseph Meara and his wife, Mary Dempsey Meara, who died when her daughter was young. Meara was raised in Great Neck and Rockville Centre, New York, where she graduated from St. Agnes High School.

Hoping to become a serious actress, Meara studied with renowned teacher Uta Hagen.

“I was a dedicated, boring student,” she later recalled. “The last thing I wanted was to be a comedienne.”

But after eight years of struggling individually, Stiller and Meara teamed up as a comedy duo and their act caught fire, drawing comparisons to the earlier success of Mike Nichols and Elaine May. In the 1970s, Stiller and Meara did their Blue Nun commercials. In a seven-year period, sales of the wine rocketed from 90,000 cases annually to more than 800,000.

In 1995, Meara wrote “After-Play,” which was described by New York Times critic Vincent Canby as “the perfect New York comedy to attend before going out to dine with dear old friends from Los Angeles.”

In addition to her husband and son, Meara’s survivors include her daughter, Amy.