Suzanne Pleshette mini-bio: Suzanne Pleshette (January 31, 1937 – January 17, 2008) was an American actress, on stage and screen, known for her role of Emily Hartley on The Bob Newhart Show in the 1970s, and for prior roles in several major films, including The Birds and Rome Adventure, as well as in Broadway plays.
Pleshette was born in Brooklyn, New York and is of Jewish heritage. 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 was a cousin of Knots Landing actor John Pleshette. She graduated from Manhattan's High School of Performing Arts and then attended Syracuse University.
Reviewers described her appearance and demeanor as sardonic and her voice as sultry.
Pleshette 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. Two years later she was featured in the comedy Golden Fleecing starring Tom Poston, who eventually would become her third husband. In February 1961, she replaced Anne Bancroft opposite 14-year-old Patty Duke in The Miracle Worker to rave reviews.
Pleshette's early screen credits include The Geisha Boy, Rome Adventure, Fate Is the Hunter, and Youngblood Hawke, but she perhaps is remembered best for her role of schoolteacher Annie Hayworth opposite Tippi Hedren in Alfred Hitchcock's classic film The Birds. In later years she provided the voices of Yubaba and Zeniba in the English dub of Japanese director Hayao Miyazaki's Academy Award-winning film Spirited Away and the voice of Zira in the Disney sequel The Lion King II: Simba's Pride.
Pleshette's early television appearances included Playhouse 90, Have Gun - Will Travel, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Ben Casey, Wagon Train, and Dr. Kildare, for which she was nominated for her first Emmy Award. She appeared as different characters in each of these late 1960s series: The Invaders, The F.B.I. and The Name of the Game.
Pleshette appeared on 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 memorable final episode of Newhart, in which viewers discovered the entire series had been dreamed by Bob Hartley when he awakens next to Pleshette in the bedroom set from The Bob Newhart Show.
Her 1984 situation comedy, Suzanne Pleshette is Maggie Briggs, was cancelled after seven episodes. In 1990, Pleshette portrayed Manhattan hotelier Leona Helmsley in the television movie The Queen of Mean, which garnered her Emmy and Golden Globe Award nominations. She had a recurring role in Good Morning, Miami, 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. The role would prove to be her last.
A native New Yorker, Suzanne Pleshette had already had a full career on stage and screen by 1971, when TV producers saw her on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, and they noticed a certain chemistry between Suzanne and another guest, Bob Newhart. She was soon cast as wife to Mr. Newhart’s character, and the series ran six seasons, from 1972 to 1978, as part of the CBS Saturday night lineup. Suzanne Pleshette's down-to-earth but elegant manner was caught during an anecdote Johnny Carson was relating 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."
Pleshette's 1964 marriage to her Rome Adventure co-star Troy Donahue ended acrimoniously after eight months. Her second husband was Texas oilman Tommy Gallagher, to whom she was wed from 1968 until his death from lung cancer on January 21, 2000. In 2001, she married Bob Newhart's former Newhart co-star Tom Poston. They were married until his death from respiratory failure in Los Angeles on April 30, 2007.
On August 11, 2006, her agent Joel Dean announced that Pleshette was being treated for lung cancer at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. On August 14, 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, a part of one of her lungs had been removed.
Pleshette died early in the evening of January 17, 2008 of respiratory failure at her Los Angeles home at age 70. She had been scheduled to receive her star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame on January 31, 2008, which would have been her 71st birthday. On the January 22 edition of Entertainment Tonight, her former co-star and longtime friend Marcia Wallace announced she would be attending the ceremony on Pleshette's behalf.
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