She started her TV career as a teenager playing Happy Hotpoint the Elf during appliance commercials on “The Adventures of Ozzie & Harriet,” then was promoted to playing David Janssen’s sultry receptionist using only her shapely legs and voice in “Richard Diamond, Private Detective.”

Not perhaps anything that screamed “superstar in the making,” but seven Emmys, a Tony Award and an Academy Award nomination later – not to mention a CBS sitcom regarded as one of the best ever made – Mary Tyler Moore accepts the life achievement award during the 18th Annual Screen Actors Guild Awards, airing on TNT and TBS on Sunday.

Moore will accept the award from someone who played a pivotal role in her career: Dick Van Dyke, with whom she starred in the CBS sitcom “The Dick Van Dyke Show” from 1961 to 1966.

“Along with (‘Dick Van Dyke Show’ creator) Carl Reiner, I think Dick is the most appropriate one (to present this),” Moore says. “Dick’s contribution was so enormous from the very start. He made me feel that we had been married for a couple of years, anyway, and it was quite an exceptional feeling.”

The actress, who was in her early 20s when she got the job, says her castmates, who included veterans Rose Marie and Morey Amsterdam, never seemed to treat her as less than a peer, but then, she was mostly focused on watching and learning.

“It was non-verbalizable, what I learned on that show, it was so rich,” Moore says. “Just watching them work, I was able to take something for the way I worked, and I did not mess around with anything. I was constantly thinking and working and trying new things and fighting through the fear that I felt that there was no way I could possibly equal Dick in any of the things that we had together.”

“She became the comedy partner of my life,” Van Dyke says. “My God, what a team we were!”

A team, as it turns out, that viewers would continue to associate with each other, especially when CBS looked at Moore’s next project, “The Mary Tyler Moore Show.”

In it, Moore’s character, Mary Richards, originally was conceived as a divorcee.

“CBS was worried that the audience would naturally visualize Rob and Laura Petrie, and no woman in her right mind could ever divorce Rob Petrie,” Moore says, laughing.

So Mary’s character’s status changed to never married.

“The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” which ran on CBS from 1970 to 1977, became something of a sitcom touchstone, assembling a matchless cast that included future Emmy winners Valerie Harper, Cloris Leachman, Ed Asner and Betty White, among others.

Moore says the cast and creative team were confident they were doing good work but never thought in terms of making a masterpiece.