She was a visual artist and met her future husband, Carl Reiner, while she was working in the Catskills, designing stage sets for hotel shows.

The re-creation was so complete that the Petries in the show lived on Bonnie Meadow Road in suburban New Rochelle, New York, the same street as the real-life Reiners.

As described by Rob Reiner, "Basically he wrote his own life" in The Dick Van Dyke Show and that “my mother was Mary Tyler Moore".

She studied the theatre with method acting pioneer Lee Strasberg and with Viola Spolin, the American Grandmother of Improvisation.

The line was ranked 33rd on the American Film Institute's list of the Top 100 movie quotations, just behind Casablanca's "Round up the usual suspects".