Teri Garr, a character actress always good for a giggle, who always won our sympathy and who even collected an Oscar nomination for her comedic skills, has died.

A scene stealer from the mid-career films of Elvis Presley, to TV’s “Star Trek” through “Young Frankenstein,” “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” an Oscar nominee for “Tootsie,” she was one of the most familiar faces on film in the ’70s and ’80s, pairing-up with Richard Dreyfuss (“Let It Ride”) more than once, appearing Coppola’s “The Conversation” and a couple of Altman films to boot.

An Ohio native and the daughter of show people, she did Broadway, the Monkees’ movie “Head,” played John Denver’s wife in “Oh, God!” Michael Keaton’s breadwinner wife in “Mr. Mom” and the mother in “The Black Stallion. In her prime, she was everywhere. And on “Letterman.” A lot.

Dreyfuss, who played her spouse twice, described her as “vibrant, playful and so funny. Her essence created an ease in every scene we did together” today on Twitter.

Here she is, all worked up, playing the Mrs. to Mr. Dreyfuss for the second time, in the gambling farce “Let It Ride.”

She had survived a brain aneurysm some years back and had struggled with mutiple sclerosis for decades. I remember chatting with her at the New York Film Festival in the early ’90s — she came to press screenings during the day — and I caught up with her after an Orlando appearance, speaking on behalf of MS awareness a few years back.

She was a real sweetheart, wistful about her salad days, plucky about her medical challenges, as disarming as she came off on the screen. Nobody did “sexy” and perky and a bit rattled better. She was Judy Holiday without the kitsch or “dim blonde” stereotyping, someone who “created her own sublime archetype,” screenwriter and wit Paul Rudnick (“In & Out”) said on Twitter.

In my era, if you didn’t have a little bit of a crush on her, funny blondes must not have been your thing.