Cloris Leachman (born April 30, 1926) is an Academy Award, nine-time Emmy and Golden Globe winning American actress of stage, film and television. She has won eight primetime Emmy Awards—more than any other female performer—and one Daytime Emmy Award. Leachman, the eldest of three sisters, was born in Des Moines, Iowa, U.S., to Buck and Cloris Leachman. She majored in drama at Northwestern University, where she was a member of Gamma Phi Beta and a classmate of future comic actor Paul Lynde. Leachman began appearing on television and in films shortly after competing in Miss America as Miss Chicago 1946.

After winning a scholarship in the beauty pageant, Leachman studied acting in New York City at the Actors Studio with Elia Kazan. She appeared in the Broadway production of William Inge's Come Back, Little Sheba.

She appeared in many live television broadcasts in the 1950s, including such programs as Suspense and Studio One. She was also one of the Raisonette Girls in the 1960's.

She made her feature film debut in Robert Aldrich's film noir classic Kiss Me Deadly, released in 1955. Leachman was several months pregnant during the filming, and appears in one scene running down a darkened highway barefoot and wearing only a trenchcoat. A year later she appeared opposite Paul Newman and Lee Marvin in The Rack (1956). She later appeared with Newman again in a brief role as a prostitute in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969).

Nonetheless, she continued to mainly work on television, her appearances including the classic It's a Good Life episode of The Twilight Zone, in which she played Billy Mumy's mother, Rawhide, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, and Lassie, in which she played Timmy's mom, Ruth Martin, for one season before being replaced by June Lockhart. Leachman has won numerous awards during her lengthy career. She won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress in The Last Picture Show (1971), based on the bestselling book by Larry McMurtry. She played the high school gym teacher's wife, with whom Timothy Bottoms' character has an affair. Director Peter Bogdanovich had predicted to Leachman during production that she would win an Academy Award for her performance. The part was originally offered to Ellen Burstyn, who wanted another role in the film

Leachman has also won a record-setting eight primetime and one daytime Emmy Awards and been nominated over 20 times for her work in television over the years, most notably as the character of neighbor/landlady/nosy friend Phyllis Lindstrom on The Mary Tyler Moore Show. The character was a fixture on the program for five years and was subsequently featured in a spinoff series, Phyllis (1975-1977), for which Leachman garnered a Golden Globe award. In 1978 she won the Sarah Siddons Award for her work in Chicago theatre.

In 1986, Leachman returned to television, replacing Charlotte Rae's character Edna Garrett as the den mother on The Facts of Life. Leachman's role, as Edna's sister, Beverly Ann Stickle, could not save the long-running series, and it was canceled two years later.