Suzanne Pleshette

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MySpace BackgroundsSuzanne Pleshette was born on January 31, 1937 in New York City. Her mother, Gloria Kaplan, was a dancer and her father, Eugene Pleshette, was the managing director of Brooklyn's Paramount Theater during the big band era. She attended Performing Arts High School at the age of 12, then Finch College and Syracuse University. After some TV experience, she broke into films with a supporting role in Jerry Lewis' The Geisha Boy (1958), and then signed a long-term contract with Warner Bros., which groomed her for stardom. She was a popular performer on Broadway and replaced Anne Bancroft as star of Broadway's The Miracle Worker to rave reviews. She teamed with Troy Donahue (to whom she was briefly married) in the romantic comedy Rome Adventure (1962) and was nominated for a Golden Globe for that role, but won her first really memorable part on loan-out as the sympathetic schoolteacher who meets a grisly end in Hitchcock's The Birds (1963). She showed maturing talent in Youngblood Hawke, A Distant Trumpet (both 1964, with Donahue), A Rage to Live (1965), Mister Buddwing and Nevada Smith (both 1966). During her years at Warner Bros., Pleshette successfully avoided simpering ingénue roles, holding out for parts requiring beyond-her-years emotional depth. In the late 60’s her flair for comedy was delightfully tapped in such films as the Disney outings The Ugly Dachshund (1966), The Adventures of Bullwhip Griffin (1967), and Blackbeard's Ghost (1968), plus If It's Tuesday, This Must Be Belgium (1969), and Support Your Local Gunfighter (1971).Her comic skills reached fruition when she was cast as Bob Newhart's wife on "The Bob Newhart Show" (1972-78). She received two Emmy nominations for her portrayal of funny and feisty Emily and later hilariously reprised that role on the very last episode of Newhart's subsequent series, Newhart. Since "The Bob Newhart Show,” Pleshette has only appeared in a handful of theatrical features, among them Disney's The Shaggy D.A (1976), several short-lived TV series, and a few made for TV movies including the title role in Leona Helmsley: The Queen of Mean (1990), which earned her both Emmy and Golden Globe nominations. More Recently she lent her husky vocal talents to a few animated features, notably the English version of Miyazaki's Spirited Away (2001), and has guest-starred in several episodes of the NBC sitcom “Will & Grace” as the estranged mother of Karen Walker.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. New York Newsday reported that Dean claimed 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."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.