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Suzanne Pleshette (January 31st, 1937
– January 19th, 2008) was an American actress and voice actress.
After beginning her career in the theatre, she began appearing in
films in the early 1960s, such as Rome Adventure (1962) and Alfred
Hitchcock's The Birds (1963). She later appeared in various
television productions, often in guest roles, and played Emily
Hartley on The Bob Newhart Show from 1972 until 1978, receiving
several Emmy Award nominations for her work. She continued acting
until 2004, four years before her death.
Reviewers described her appearance and
demeanor as sardonic and her voice as sultry (her husky voice would
become her trademark). She began her career as a stage actress. She
made her Broadway debut in Meyer Levin's 1957 play Compulsion,
adapted from his novel inspired by the Leopold and Loeb case.
The following year she performed in the
debut of The Cold Wind and the Warm by S. N. Behrman at the Shubert
Theatre in New Haven, Connecticut, directed by Harold Clurman and
produced by Robert Whitehead. In 1959 she was featured in the comedy
Golden Fleecing starring Constance Ford and Tom Poston. (Poston would
eventually become her third husband.) That same year, she was one of
two finalists for the role of Louise/Gypsy in the original production
of Gypsy. During the run of The Cold Wind and the Warm she spent
mornings taking striptease lessons from Jerome Robbins for the role
in Gypsy. In his autobiography, the play's author Arthur Laurents
states, "It came down to between Suzanne Pleshette and Sandra
Church. Suzanne was the better actress, but Sandra was the better
singer. We went with Sandra." In February 1961, she succeeded Anne Bancroft as Anne Sullivan Macy opposite 14-year-old Patty Duke's Helen Keller in The Miracle Worker. |
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Pleshette's first screen role was in the episode "Night Rescue" (December 5th, 1957) of the CBS adventure/drama television series, Harbourmaster, starring Barry Sullivan and Paul Burke. Her other early screen credits include The Geisha Boy, Rome Adventure, Fate Is the Hunter, Youngblood Hawke and 40 Pounds of Trouble with Tony Curtis (above), but she was best known at that time for her role in Alfred Hitchcock's classic suspense film The Birds (below). She worked with Steve McQueen in the 1966 western drama film Nevada Smith, was nominated for a Laurel Award for her starring performance in the comedy If It's Tuesday, This Must Be Belgium opposite Ian McShane, and co-starred with James Garner in a pair of films, the drama Mister Buddwing and the western comedy Support Your Local Gunfighter. |
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Her early television appearances included
Playhouse 90, Have Gun – Will Travel, Riverboat, Alfred
Hitchcock Presents, Ben Casey, Naked City, Wagon Train, and Dr.
Kildare, for which she was nominated for her first Emmy Award. She
guest-starred more than once as different characters in each of these
1960s TV series: Route 66, The Fugitive, The Invaders, The F.B.I.,
"Columbo" (1971) and The Name of the Game.
The series finale of Newhart, entitled
"The Last Newhart", has been described as one of the most
memorable in television history. The entire town is purchased by a
visiting Japanese tycoon, who turns the hamlet into a huge golf
course and recreation resort. Dick and Joanna are the only
townspeople who refuse to leave and continue to run the Stratford
Inn, which is now located in the middle of the golf course. At one
point Dick gets knocked out by a golf ball, when he awakens he is
next to Pleshette in bed on the set previously seen on The Bob
Newhart Show and explains his "weird dream" to Emily.
"Honey, you won't believe the dream I just had." Pleshette
turns on the light and rolls over to speak with him reviving a bit
from The Bob Newhart Show, in which one of the Hartleys incredulously
flicks back on a bedside light and restarts a conversation. Interviews with Newhart, Pleshette and director Dick Martin reveal that the final scene was kept a secret from the cast and most of the crew. A fake ending was written up to throw off the tabloids and Pleshette was kept hidden until her scene was shot. When the scene began, many people in the audience recognized the set as the bedroom from "The Bob Newhart Show" and burst into spontaneous applause and Pleshette and Newhart did the scene in one take. |
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In November 2005, the series finale was
named by TV Guide and TV Land the most unexpected moment in TV
history. In 2011, the finale was ranked No. 4 on the TV Guide Network
special, TV's Most Unforgettable Finales, and in 2013 was ranked
number 1 in Entertainment Weekly's 20 Best TV Series Finales Ever.
She had a starring role in Good Morning, Miami, as Mark Feuerstein's grandmother Claire Arnold in season one and played the mother of Katey Sagal's character in the ABC sitcom 8 Simple Rules for Dating My Teenage Daughter following John Ritter's death, and appeared as the estranged mother of Megan Mullally's character Karen Walker in three episodes of Will & Grace (left). The role would prove to be her last. A native New Yorker, Suzanne Pleshette had already experienced a full career on stage and screen by 1971 when TV producers saw her on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, and they noticed a certain chemistry between Suzanne and another guest, Bob Newhart. She was soon cast as the wife of Newhart’s character, and the series ran for six seasons from 1972 to 1978 as part of CBS television's Saturday night lineup. Pleshette's down-to-earth but elegant manner was caught during an anecdote that Carson was relating to her about working with a farm tractor in Nebraska. When he asked her, "Have you ever ridden on a tractor?" she replied smoothly, "Johnny, I've never even been in a Chevrolet."
On August 11st, 2006 her agent, Joel Dean,
announced that Pleshette, a long-time smoker, was being treated for
lung cancer at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. On August 14th, 2006, New
York Newsday reported that Dean claimed the cancer was the size of
"a grain of sand" when it was found during a routine X-ray,
that the cancer was "caught very much in time", that she
was receiving chemotherapy as an outpatient, and that Pleshette was
"in good spirits".
She was later hospitalized for a pulmonary
infection and developed pneumonia, causing her to be hospitalized for
an extended period. She arrived at a Bob Newhart Show cast reunion in
September 2007 in a wheelchair, causing concern about her health,
although she insisted that she was "cancer free" (she was
seated in a regular chair during the actual telecast). During an
interview in USA Today given at the time of the reunion, Pleshette
stated that she had been released four days earlier from the hospital
where, as part of her cancer treatment, part of one of her lungs had
been removed. Pleshette died in the early evening of January 19th, 2008, at her Los Angeles home, twelve days before her 71st birthday. She is buried next to her third husband Tom Poston in the Hillside Memorial Park Cemetery in Culver City, California. She received her star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for Television on January 31st, 2008. Pleshette received the walk's 2,355th star. Bob Newhart, Arte Johnson, and Marcia Wallace spoke at the star's unveiling, which had been planned before Pleshette's death. Tina Sinatra accepted the star on Pleshette's behalf. Others in attendance included Peter Falk, Dick Van Dyke, and Rod Taylor and Tippi Hedren, her co-stars from The Birds. |
Pleshette
was born in Brooklyn Heights, New York City. Her parents were Jewish
and the children of immigrants from Russia and Austria-Hungary. Her
mother, Geraldine (née Kaplan), was a dancer and artist who
performed under the stage name Geraldine Rivers. Her father, Eugene
Pleshette, was a stage manager, network executive and manager of the
Paramount Theater in Brooklyn. She graduated from Manhattan's High
School of Performing Arts and then attended Syracuse University for
one semester before transferring to Finch College. She later
graduated from Manhattan's prestigious acting school, The
Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theater, and was under the
tutelage of legendary acting teacher Sanford Meisner.
Pleshette
was the co-star of the popular CBS sitcom The Bob Newhart Show
(1972–1978) for all six seasons, and was nominated twice for the
Emmy for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Comedy Series. She reprised
her role of Emily Hartley in the final episode of a subsequent comedy
series, Newhart.
Her
1984 situation comedy, Suzanne Pleshette Is Maggie Briggs, was
canceled after seven episodes. In 1989, she played the role of
Christine Broderick in the NBC drama, Nightingales, which only lasted
one season. In 1990, Pleshette portrayed Manhattan hotelier Leona
Helmsley in the television movie Leona Helmsley: The Queen of Mean,
which garnered her Emmy and Golden Globe Award nominations. In
addition, she starred opposite Hal Linden in the 1994 sitcom The Boys
Are Back.
Pleshette's
1964 marriage to her Rome Adventure and A Distant Trumpet co-star
Troy Donahue ended acrimoniously after just eight months. Her second
husband was Texas oilman Tom Gallagher, to whom she was wed from 1968
until his death from lung cancer on January 21st, 2000. She suffered
a miscarriage during her marriage to Gallagher, and the couple were
childless. Asked about children in an October 2000 interview,
Pleshette stated: "I certainly would have liked to have had
Tommy’s children. But my nurturing instincts are fulfilled in
other ways. I have a large extended family; I'm the mother on every
set. So if this is my particular karma, that's fine." After
becoming a widow, she and widower Tom Poston (a Newhart regular)
rekindled an old romance they had enjoyed when appearing together in
"The Golden Fleecing", a 1959 Broadway comedy. They were
married from 2001 until Poston's death, in April 2007.
