Suzanne Pleshette, sexy star of 'Bob Newhart Show,' dies at 70
Suzanne Pleshette, the dark-haired, smoky-voiced actress who played Bob Newhart's confident and sexy wife, Emily Hartley, for six years on the popular 1970s sitcom "The Bob Newhart Show," has died. She was 70.
The widow of comic actor Tom Poston, Pleshette died of respiratory failure Saturday evening at her Los Angeles home, Robert Finkelstein, an entertainment lawyer and family friend, told the Associated Press. Pleshette underwent chemotherapy in 2006 for lung cancer.
A stage-trained New York actress who made her movie debut in the 1958 Jerry Lewis comedy "The Geisha Boy," Pleshette appeared in such films as "The Birds," "Nevada Smith," "Youngblood Hawke," "A Rage to Live" and "Fate Is the Hunter."
She also appeared with Troy Donahue, to whom she was married for eight months in 1964, in the 1962 romantic drama "Rome Adventure" and the 1964 western "A Distant Trumpet."
On Broadway in 1961, Pleshette replaced Anne Bancroft in the role of Annie Sullivan in "The Miracle Worker," opposite Patty Duke as Helen Keller.
And on television in 1991, she earned an Emmy Award nomination for the title role in the TV movie "Leona Helmsley: The Queen of Mean."
But she had a flair for comedy.
Among her screen credits are "40 Pounds of Trouble," "If It's Tuesday, This Must Be Belgium," "Support Your Local Gunfighter," "The Shaggy D.A.," "The Adventures of Bullwhip Griffin," "The Ugly Dachshund" and "Blackbeard's Ghost."
Pleshette, however, is best remembered for playing what New York Times critic Frank Rich once described as "the sensible yet woolly wife" on "The Bob Newhart Show," which ran from 1972 to 1978. Her role as Emily earned her two Emmy nominations.
Pleshette retired from acting after marrying her second husband, wealthy businessman Tom Gallagher, in 1968. She told TV Guide in 1972 that after she'd been hanging around the house for six months, "my loving husband said, 'You're getting to be awfully boring. Go back to work.' "
After trying to figure out how she could return to work without having to get up at 5 a.m. or go out of town for weeks on movie locations, she recalled, "I said to myself, 'What can you do best?' 'Talk,' I said. 'So what better than the talk shows on TV?' I said. I picked up the phone and asked my agent to try to book me with Johnny Carson."
She made a couple of dozen appearances on the Carson show over the next few years, including one with fellow guest Newhart -- a show seen by writers David Davis and Lorenzo Music, the creatorsof the upcoming Newhart show.
"Suzanne started talking, and I looked at Lorenzo and Lorenzo looked at me," Davis told TV Guide. "There she was, just what we were looking for.
"She was revealing her own frailties, talking freely about being over 30. She was bubble-headed but smart, loving toward her husband but relentless about his imperfections. We were trying to get away from the standard TV wife, and we knew that whoever we picked would have to be offbeat enough and strong enough to carry the show along with Newhart. We didn't dream Suzanne would accept the part."
Pleshette told the magazine that "Bob is just like my husband, Tommy, letting me go bumbling and stumbling through life. And the way it's written, the part is me. There's the stream of non sequiturs by which I live. There are fights. I'm allowed to be demonstrative. But the core of the marriage is good."
Off-camera, Pleshette was known for being what an Orlando Sentinel reporter once described as "an earthy dame, an Auntie Mame who isn't afraid to tell a dirty story." Or, as TV Guide put it in 1972: "Her conversations -- mostly meandering monologues -- are sprinkled with aphorisms, anecdotes, salty opinions and X-rated expletives."
She enjoyed talking so much that during the making of "The Geisha Boy," Lewis took to calling her "Big Mouth."
Newhart, according to the TV Guide article, "was finding himself outtalked by Suzanne on the set about 12 to 1 but professed to be unperturbed by the phenomenon."
"I don't tangle," Newhart said, "with any lady who didn't give Johnny a chance to exercise his mouth -- even to sneer -- for 10 whole minutes."
Although Newhart got a new TV wife, played by Mary Frann, for his 1982-90 situation comedy "Newhart," Pleshette had the last laugh -- making a memorable surprise guest appearance as Newhart's previous TV wife, Emily, at the end of the series' final episode.
In it, Dick Loudon, the Vermont innkeeper Newhart played on "Newhart," is knocked out by a stray golf ball. Then the show cuts to a darkened bedroom as he wakes up and turns on the light to reveal Chicago psychologist Bob Hartley's bedroom from "The Bob Newhart Show." The Vermont-set "Newhart" and its colorful characters, it turns out, had only been a dream, and Pleshette's Emily tells Bob he should watch what he eats before going to bed.
In a 1990 interview with "CBS This Morning," Pleshette recalled that when the "Newhart" studio audience first saw the familiar bedroom set from the old series, she heard gasps.
"And then they heard this mumble under the covers, and nobody does my octave, you know," she recalled. "And I think they suspected it might be me, but when that dark hair came up from under the covers, they stood and screamed."
For her and Newhart "to be together again with the old rhythms, looking into each other's eyes, was just wonderful," she said. And, she said, it was "very touching and so dear" that the studio audience "remembered us with such affection."
Pleshette was born Jan. 31, 1937, in New York City. Her mother had been a dancer, and her father was the manager of the New York and Brooklyn Paramount theaters during their big-band days.
After attending the New York High School of the Performing Arts -- "I found myself there," Pleshette later said -- she spent a semester at Syracuse University and a semester at Finch College before moving on to the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre and acting teacher Sanford Meisner.
Pleshette also starred in the short-lived sitcoms "Suzanne Pleshette Is Maggie Briggs" (1984) and "The Boys Are Back" (1994-95) and the dramatic series "Bridges to Cross" (1986) and "Nightingales" (1989).
More recently, she played the lusty grandmother in the sitcom "Good Morning, Miami" (2002-03).
Pleshette was married to Gallagher from 1968 until his death in 2000.
She first met -- and dated -- Poston when they appeared together in the 1959 Broadway comedy "Golden Fleecing." They were both dealing with the deaths of their spouses in 2000 when they got back together. They were married the next year.
"They are a romantic duo," actor Tim Conway, a friend of Poston's, told People magazine in 2001. "It's almost embarrassing. You have to put cold water on them."
Poston died in April at age 85 after a brief illness.
Details on survivors were not immediately available.
January 20, 2008
Suzanne Pleshette, 70, ‘Newhart’ Actress, Dies
Suzanne Pleshette, the husky-voiced actress who redefined the television sitcom wife in the 1970s, playing the smart, sardonic Emily Hartley on “The Bob Newhart Show,” died Saturday at her home in Los Angeles. She was 70.
Ms. Pleshette died of respiratory failure, her lawyer, Robert Finkelstein, told The Associated Press. Ms. Pleshette had undergone chemotherapy in 2006 for lung cancer.
A native New Yorker, Ms. Pleshette already had a full career on stage and screen in 1971 when producers saw her on “The Tonight Show With Johnny Carson” and noticed a chemistry between her and another guest, Mr. Newhart. She was soon cast as the wife of Mr. Newhart’s character, a mild-mannered Chicago psychologist, and the series ran six seasons, from 1972 to 1978, as part of CBS’s ratings-winning Saturday night lineup.
Emily Hartley’s work life (as a schoolteacher) did not receive much attention, but the character was confident, sexy and anything but submissive to her husband.
Moviegoers knew Ms. Pleshette from a string of Hollywood features, and her low-key performances often transcended thankless roles in bad movies. She made her film debut in a 1958 Jerry Lewis comedy, “The Geisha Boy,” in a supporting role as a romantic WAC sergeant. She came to teenage audiences’ attention in her second movie, “Rome Adventure” (1962), a good-girl, bad-girl romance opposite Troy Donahue, the beautiful blond heartthrob of the moment. (Ms. Pleshette played the virgin.) After making another film together in 1964, she and Mr. Donahue married, but the marriage lasted only eight months.
Alfred Hitchcock fans knew Ms. Pleshette best as the pretty small-town teacher who not only loses the guy (Rod Taylor) to the blonde (Tippi Hedren), but is also pecked to death by an angry flock in “The Birds” (1963). Because she was a method actress, “Hitch didn’t know what to do with me,” Ms. Pleshette said in a 1999 Film Quarterly interview with other Hitchcock heroines. “He regretted the day that he hired me.” Many disagreed with that conclusion.
Suzanne Pleshette was born Jan. 31, 1937, in Brooklyn Heights, to Eugene Pleshette, who managed the Paramount and Brooklyn Paramount theaters, and Gloria Kaplan Pleshette, a former dancer.
An only child, Ms. Pleshette attended the New York High School of the Performing Arts, then Syracuse University and transferred to Finch College, on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. She also studied at the Neighborhood Playhouse in New York and with its teaching star Sanford Meisner.
Her professional career began in 1957 with her television debut, a single episode in a short-lived adventure series, “Harbourmaster,” and her Broadway debut in “Compulsion,” a drama about the Leopold and Loeb murder case, in which she played Fourth Girl but soon moved up to a supporting role. In 1959, she appeared in “Golden Fleecing,” a comedy set in Venice, opposite Tom Poston, whom she would marry four decades later.
Her real Broadway triumph came in February 1961 when she replaced Anne Bancroft (who had just won a Tony Award) as Annie Sullivan in “The Miracle Worker,” opposite 14-year-old Patty Duke. Her reviews were admiring.
Ms. Pleshette returned to Broadway once more, some two decades later. “Special Occasions” (1982), a play about a divorced couple, was so ravaged by theater critics that it closed after a series of previews and one regular performance. Frank Rich, writing in The New York Times, excoriated the play but praised Ms. Pleshette’s performance: “The throaty voice, wide-open smiles and quick intelligence are as alluring as ever,” he wrote.
Ms. Pleshette had an active film career in the 1960s and the first half of the ’70s. She starred in several Disney movies, including “The Shaggy D.A.” (1976). Early on, she dealt with heavier subjects, playing a flight attendant who survives an airline crash in “Fate Is the Hunter” (1964), a sexually compulsive heiress in “A Rage to Live” (1965) and a book editor trying to save a successful young author from himself in “Youngblood Hawke” (1964). Eventually, though, she seemed to settle into comedies, like “If It’s Tuesday, This Must Be Belgium” (1969), about a busload of unhappy American tourists.
But it was in television that she received the greatest recognition. She was nominated for an Emmy Award four times, first in 1962 for a guest performance in “Dr. Kildare,” twice for “The Bob Newhart Show” (1977 and 1978) and in 1991 for playing the title role in the television movie “Leona Helmsley: The Queen of Mean.”
She was never in a hit series again (although there were efforts), but she continued to appear in television movies and as a guest in popular series into the 21st century. Her last role was as Megan Mullally’s estranged mother in several episodes of NBC’s “Will & Grace” from 2002 to 2004.
After her divorce from Mr. Donahue, Ms. Pleshette married twice. In 1968, she wed Tom Gallagher, a businessman, a marriage that lasted until his death in 2000. In 2001 she wed Tom Poston, her long-ago Broadway co-star, who had also been a guest star on “The Bob Newhart Show” and a regular in Mr. Newhart’s second sitcom, “Newhart,” in the 1980s. He died last year.
Arguably Ms. Pleshette’s most memorable television moment was not in “The Bob Newhart Show” but in the final episode of “Newhart.” On May 21, 1990, Mr. Newhart’s character, Dick Loudon, was hit in the head by a golf ball and woke up to find himself in Dr. Robert Hartley’s bed, with his beautiful, unfailingly sane wife, Emily, at his side. The whole second sitcom had been a nightmare.
The episode was considered one of the most successful series finales in television history, partly because it managed to remain a secret until it was broadcast. As time passed, some found the scene a useful metaphor for hopes that a difficult situation might turn out to be just a bad dream. In 1999, a headline in the humor publication The Onion read, “Universe Ends as God Wakes Up Next to Suzanne Pleshette.”
Suzanne Pleshette, the husky-voiced actress who redefined the television sitcom wife in the 1970s, playing the smart, sardonic Emily Hartley on “The Bob Newhart Show,” died Saturday at her home in Los Angeles. She was 70.
Ms. Pleshette died of respiratory failure, her lawyer, Robert Finkelstein, told The Associated Press. Ms. Pleshette had undergone chemotherapy in 2006 for lung cancer.
A native New Yorker, Ms. Pleshette already had a full career on stage and screen in 1971 when producers saw her on “The Tonight Show With Johnny Carson” and noticed a chemistry between her and another guest, Mr. Newhart. She was soon cast as the wife of Mr. Newhart’s character, a mild-mannered Chicago psychologist, and the series ran six seasons, from 1972 to 1978, as part of CBS’s ratings-winning Saturday night lineup.
Emily Hartley’s work life (as a schoolteacher) did not receive much attention, but the character was confident, sexy and anything but submissive to her husband.
Moviegoers knew Ms. Pleshette from a string of Hollywood features, and her low-key performances often transcended thankless roles in bad movies. She made her film debut in a 1958 Jerry Lewis comedy, “The Geisha Boy,” in a supporting role as a romantic WAC sergeant. She came to teenage audiences’ attention in her second movie, “Rome Adventure” (1962), a good-girl, bad-girl romance opposite Troy Donahue, the beautiful blond heartthrob of the moment. (Ms. Pleshette played the virgin.) After making another film together in 1964, she and Mr. Donahue married, but the marriage lasted only eight months.
Alfred Hitchcock fans knew Ms. Pleshette best as the pretty small-town teacher who not only loses the guy (Rod Taylor) to the blonde (Tippi Hedren), but is also pecked to death by an angry flock in “The Birds” (1963). Because she was a method actress, “Hitch didn’t know what to do with me,” Ms. Pleshette said in a 1999 Film Quarterly interview with other Hitchcock heroines. “He regretted the day that he hired me.” Many disagreed with that conclusion.
Suzanne Pleshette was born Jan. 31, 1937, in Brooklyn Heights, to Eugene Pleshette, who managed the Paramount and Brooklyn Paramount theaters, and Gloria Kaplan Pleshette, a former dancer.
An only child, Ms. Pleshette attended the New York High School of the Performing Arts, then Syracuse University and transferred to Finch College, on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. She also studied at the Neighborhood Playhouse in New York and with its teaching star Sanford Meisner.
Her professional career began in 1957 with her television debut, a single episode in a short-lived adventure series, “Harbourmaster,” and her Broadway debut in “Compulsion,” a drama about the Leopold and Loeb murder case, in which she played Fourth Girl but soon moved up to a supporting role. In 1959, she appeared in “Golden Fleecing,” a comedy set in Venice, opposite Tom Poston, whom she would marry four decades later.
Her real Broadway triumph came in February 1961 when she replaced Anne Bancroft (who had just won a Tony Award) as Annie Sullivan in “The Miracle Worker,” opposite 14-year-old Patty Duke. Her reviews were admiring.
Ms. Pleshette returned to Broadway once more, some two decades later. “Special Occasions” (1982), a play about a divorced couple, was so ravaged by theater critics that it closed after a series of previews and one regular performance. Frank Rich, writing in The New York Times, excoriated the play but praised Ms. Pleshette’s performance: “The throaty voice, wide-open smiles and quick intelligence are as alluring as ever,” he wrote.
Ms. Pleshette had an active film career in the 1960s and the first half of the ’70s. She starred in several Disney movies, including “The Shaggy D.A.” (1976). Early on, she dealt with heavier subjects, playing a flight attendant who survives an airline crash in “Fate Is the Hunter” (1964), a sexually compulsive heiress in “A Rage to Live” (1965) and a book editor trying to save a successful young author from himself in “Youngblood Hawke” (1964). Eventually, though, she seemed to settle into comedies, like “If It’s Tuesday, This Must Be Belgium” (1969), about a busload of unhappy American tourists.
But it was in television that she received the greatest recognition. She was nominated for an Emmy Award four times, first in 1962 for a guest performance in “Dr. Kildare,” twice for “The Bob Newhart Show” (1977 and 1978) and in 1991 for playing the title role in the television movie “Leona Helmsley: The Queen of Mean.”
She was never in a hit series again (although there were efforts), but she continued to appear in television movies and as a guest in popular series into the 21st century. Her last role was as Megan Mullally’s estranged mother in several episodes of NBC’s “Will & Grace” from 2002 to 2004.
After her divorce from Mr. Donahue, Ms. Pleshette married twice. In 1968, she wed Tom Gallagher, a businessman, a marriage that lasted until his death in 2000. In 2001 she wed Tom Poston, her long-ago Broadway co-star, who had also been a guest star on “The Bob Newhart Show” and a regular in Mr. Newhart’s second sitcom, “Newhart,” in the 1980s. He died last year.
Arguably Ms. Pleshette’s most memorable television moment was not in “The Bob Newhart Show” but in the final episode of “Newhart.” On May 21, 1990, Mr. Newhart’s character, Dick Loudon, was hit in the head by a golf ball and woke up to find himself in Dr. Robert Hartley’s bed, with his beautiful, unfailingly sane wife, Emily, at his side. The whole second sitcom had been a nightmare.
The episode was considered one of the most successful series finales in television history, partly because it managed to remain a secret until it was broadcast. As time passed, some found the scene a useful metaphor for hopes that a difficult situation might turn out to be just a bad dream. In 1999, a headline in the humor publication The Onion read, “Universe Ends as God Wakes Up Next to Suzanne Pleshette.”
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