Suzanne Pleshette

Pleshette once said she was not an acting natural but just "found" herself at New York City's High School of the Performing Arts. She attended Syracuse University for a semester, then Finch College, before dropping out to study with Sanford Meisner at the Neighborhood Playhouse. She made her Broadway debut in 1957 in Compulsion, initially as "The Fourth Girl" and later taking over the ingénue role. In 1958, she appeared opposite Jerry Lewis in The Geisha Boy, and on Broadway she replaced Anne Bancroft in The Miracle Worker. Her film career included a memorable role in Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds (1963), where she played the brunette schoolteacher jilted by the hero.

But it was television that made her a household name. Pleshette achieved television immortality as Emily Hartley, the wife of Bob Newhart's character on The Bob Newhart Show (1972). She earned two Emmy nominations for that role, in 1977 and 1978, and earlier received an Emmy nomination in 1962 for a guest spot on Dr. Kildare. She also earned a nomination for her 1990 TV movie Leona Helmsley: The Queen of Mean. After the show ended, she worked steadily in TV movies and headlined her own short-lived sitcom, Suzanne Pleshette Is Maggie Briggs, in 1984. She co-starred with Hal Linden in The Boys Are Back in the 1994-95 season and had recurring roles on Good Morning, Miami and 8 Simple Rules.

Pleshette's personal life included three marriages. In 1964, she married Troy Donahue, her co-star in Rome Adventure and A Distant Trumpet, but the marriage lasted less than a year. Her second marriage, to Texas oil millionaire Tom Gallagher, lasted from 1968 until his death in 2000. After Gallagher's death, she rekindled a romance with Tom Poston, a Newhart regular, whom she had met during the 1959 Broadway comedy The Golden Fleecing. They were married from 2001 until Poston's death in April 2007.

Pleshette was diagnosed with lung cancer in 2006 and underwent chemotherapy. She rallied, but in late 2007 she barely survived pneumonia. She died of respiratory failure on January 19, 2008, a few days before her 71st birthday. Those who knew her described her as gregarious and down-to-earth, a woman who loved to talk and often told naughty stories. Bob Newhart and his producers chose her for The Bob Newhart Show after seeing her hold her own with Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show, where she proved herself a first-rate raconteuse. She was an American, and her body type was average.