Valerie Harper Has Brain Cancer And 3 Months To Live

"Mary Tyler Moore" star Valerie Harper is on the cover of this week's People magazine with a tragic confession: she has terminal brain cancer.

The 73-year-old actress first rose to fame in the 1970s playing brash New Yorker Rhoda Morgenstern to Mary Tyler Moore's good girl Mary Richards and even had her own spinoff show "Rhoda."

But on January 15, the TV icon received news that would change her life forever.

"A battery of tests revealed she has leptomeningeal carcinomatosis, a rare condition that occurs when cancer cells spread into the fluid-filled membrane surrounding the brain," reports People. "Her doctors say she has as little as three months left to live."

The incurable disease, which accounts for less than 2 percent of all cancers, "comes on quickly and progresses quickly," Harper's oncologist, Dr. Ronald Natale, director of the Lung Cancer Research Program at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, explained to the magazine.

I don't think of dying," says the actress, who previously battled lung cancer in 2009. "I think of being here now."