Valerie Harper isn’t letting her battle with terminal brain cancer stop her acting career.
Harper, 73, is currently in Vancouver, Canada filming “The Town That Came-A-Courtin’,” a TV movie scheduled to air in January on digital network UP.
In the movie, based on Ronda Rich’s novel, Harper plays Charlotte, the owner of a Mississippi B&B who encounters Abby Houston (Lauren Holly), a successful author traveling with her publicist, Jamie (Lucie Guest) — who’s held captive in a backwoods cabin by an obsessed fan. While the subject matter sounds ominous, the movie is billed as an “uplifting, sometimes bumpy romance.”
Harper, who shot to fame as sassy Rhoda Morgenstern on “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” — and anchored her own CBS spinoff, “Rhoda” — announced in March that she was diagnosed in January with a rare form of brain cancer (she’d battled lung cancer in 2009).
At the time, Harper said that doctors told her that she could have as little as three months to live.
She made a slew of talk-show appearances to discuss her condition, then signed on to reunite with several of her “MTM” co-stars — including Mary Tyler Moore and Cloris Leachman — for an episode of TV Land’s “Hot in Cleveland,” which stars former “MTM”-er Betty White. That episode is scheduled to air Sept. 4.
UP, which is based in Atlanta, airs on Time Warner Cable (Ch. 152), DirecTV (Ch. 338) and DISH network (Ch. 188) — and bills itself as airing “uplifting family entertainment.”



