Suzanne Pleshette

Pleshette's first screen role was in the episode "Night Rescue" (December 5, 1957) of the

1970 game show appearances include It Takes Two,^[22][23] with her husband, and Name Droppers.^[24]

On May 19, 1971,^[25] TV producers saw her on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson^{[26][27][28][29]} and noticed a certain chemistry between Suzanne and Johnny.^{[citation needed]} She was cast as the wife of Newhart's character on the popular CBS sitcom The Bob Newhart Show (1972–1978) for all six seasons,^[1] as part of CBS television's Saturday night lineup. During this time she was nominated twice for the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Comedy Series. She reprised her role of Emily Hartley in the final episode of Newhart's subsequent comedy series, Newhart, in which viewers discovered that the entire later series had been her husband Bob's dream when he awakens next to her in the bedroom set from the earlier series.

During this time she starred in films such as the western comedy

Madlyn Rhue was her "oldest friend".^[34][35]

Pleshette appears in beach home movies filmed by Roddy McDowall in 1965.^{[36][37][38][39][40][41]}

Marriages

Pleshette's 1964 marriage to her Rome Adventure and A Distant Trumpet co-star Troy Donahue^[42] ended in divorce after six months.^[43]

Her second husband was oilman "Tommy" Thomas Joseph Gallagher III

In 2001, Pleshette married fellow actor Tom Poston. Poston had been a recurring guest star on The Bob Newhart Show in the 1970s and a Newhart cast member. But long before they worked together on television, Poston and Pleshette had been involved romantically in 1959, when they acted together in the Broadway comedy Golden Fleecing.^[8][15] During the subsequent 40 years, they married others but remained friends. After they were both widowed, the deaths of their spouses brought Poston and Pleshette together again, and they married in 2001. They remained married until his death from respiratory failure in Los Angeles on April 30, 2007.

Pleshette’s last public appearance was with the cast of “The Bob Newhart Show” at The Bob Newhart Show 35th Anniversary Reunion at PaleyLive LA, 2007-09-05, at the Paley Center for Media, in Beverly Hills.^[50] She died Saturday, 19 January 2008; obituaries described her as hazel-eyed, earthy, bawdy, and husky-voiced.^{[51][52][53][54][55][56][57][58]}

Gallagher, Pleshette, and Poston are all interred^[59][60] close to each other in the Jewish Hillside Memorial Park Cemetery.^[61]

Suzanne Pleshette was the cousin of the actor John Pleshette.^[62]

Interests

From 1969 to 1980, Pleshette and

On August 11, 2006, Pleshette's agent Joel Dean announced that she was being treated for lung cancer at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. Three days later, The Herald-Palladium reported that Dean said 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."^[72]

She was later hospitalized for a pulmonary infection and developed

Pleshette died in the early evening of January 19, 2008, 12 days shy of her 71st birthday, in her Los Angeles home.[1] She is buried close to her third husband, Tom Poston (who died the previous year), in the Hillside Memorial Park Cemetery in Culver City, California. She received a star^[74] on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for Television on January 31, 2008, the walk's 2,355th star, which was placed (at her request^[75]) in front of Frederick's of Hollywood.^[76][77] 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.^[78][79]

Filmography

Films

Television

Theatre

Awards and nominations

References