Actress Suzanne Pleshette Dies

Her face had ready-made drama: jet-black hair framing kabuki-white skin. Her gray-blue eyes could smolder on cue or, more readily, crease into a smile. The sultry voice and famously knowing laugh suggested a woman who had been places, had fun there and come back intact. Suzanne Pleshette was a perfect fit for the movies' golden age, in sophisticated romantic comedy (think of a brunette Carole Lombard, a springier Rosalind Russell) or the kind of elevated soap opera where she could lure a man to hell or sacrifice all in a tearful close-up. I see her swapping love banter with Cary Grant, taming Gary Cooper.

Unfortunately for her, Hollywood had stopped making the kinds of films that would have made Pleshette a star two decades before she got there. So she played Bob Newhart's wife Emily on his-six-year sitcom in the 1970s. That's how Pleshette is being remembered, on her death Saturday from respiratory failure. In 2006 she had undergone chemotherapy for lung cancer. But I prefer to think of her as one of those stars who got away — away from stardom, when the old dream factory forgot how to manufacture domestic glamour. She had all the goods, but at the wrong time.

She was born in New York City, the daughter of the manager of the Paramount Theatre in its movie-and-big-band heyday. She was on TV and on Broadway by her 20th birthday. She replaced Anne Bancroft in The Miracle Worker, as Helen Keller's teacher Annie Sullivan, and played opposite the young Tom Poston in The Golden Fleecing. Warner Bros. signed her to help fill its burgeoning TV production slate, which included such effluvia as 77 Sunset Strip and Hawaiian Eye. But Warners was in the young-blond business, promoting girls (Diane McBain, Connie Stevens) and boys (Edd Byrnes, Troy Donahue) who embodied California's Aryan ethos. The very New York Pleshette had just arrived, and already she didn't fit.

More often than not, she was cast as the nice, bright girl whose charisma can't match the snazzy blondes the hero has fallen for. As a frumpy spinster in Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds (1963), she loses Rod Taylor to up-market Tippi Hedren, then loses her life to the avian horde. She seems to have secured Donahue's love in the 1962 Rome Adventure until she catches him being kissed by mantrap Angie Dickinson. (Pleshette was married to Donahue for eight months in 1964.) Somehow her intelligence, which should have registered as high voltage — "intense" — was perceived by the studio as low-wattage: "sensible. " Being considered comfortable instead of dangerous had its compensations. It meant she would be a welcome presence in America's homes.

Annie Sullivan had a deaf-mute for her student; The Bob Newhart Show's Emily Hartley, also a teacher, had a class full of difficult charges. Husband Bob, a Chicago psychologist, was a ditherer whose tone mixed resignation with exasperation. The personalities of his patients and neighbors mostly verged on the clinical. The show's mild joke was that they were all dependent on Bob, who was dependent on Emily — the one grownup on the show. In a famous episode, Bob frets when he learns that her IQ is 22 points higher than his. To her it's no big deal; she has the grace not to consider herself superior. That's how a 70s TV wife subtly stooped to a level of equality with her insecure mate.

As combination wife, den mother and sounding board — the norm by which all the kooks on the show were measured and found wanting (though funny) — Pleshette made sardonic seem cozy. Essentially the straight woman, she could assert herself in a scene just by being there; she was the footnote you want to read before getting to the main text. Her voice could coax, critique and forgive in one sentence; she was champion of the verbal raised eyebrow, but never in contempt, always in amusement. Though Emily and Bob were more or less post-sexual, they often ended an episode in bed, rehashing the day's events, he still complaining, she offering the vocal equivalent of warm pats and cold compresses.

Newhart obviously thought Pleshette was a crucial anchor to his comic dinghy. In his subsequent sitcom Newhart, he had a different wife (Mary Frann) and a new set of kooks (including Poston). But in the last scene of the final episode he wakes, startled, to find Emily-Suzanne in their old bed, as if the eight years in New England had been a dream.

Other sitcoms, from Will & Grace to 8 Simple Rules, borrowed Pleshette's line-reading skills and Mensa warmth. She did voice work for Disney, lending her dusky chops to Zira in The Lion King II, Zeniba in the English-language version of Spirited Away. She also got a chance to play an old-Hollywood meanie: Leona Helmsley in a TV bio-pic, The Queen of Mean. And in a nice rounding off of her life, Pleshette married fellow Newhart alum Poston in 2001, 42 years after appearing with him on Broadway. He died last April.

"I don't sit around and wait for great parts," she once said. "I'm an actress, and I love being one, and I'll probably be doing it till I�m 72... " Not quite. She died 12 days before her 71st birthday. But on late shows and in reruns, Suzanne Pleshette will still be the soul of comic common sense, still sending out beams of a very reasonable radiance.

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.