Film, TV actress Suzanne Pleshette, 70, dies

LOS ANGELES – Suzanne Pleshette, the dark-haired, smoky-voiced actress who played Bob Newhart’s confident and sexy wife, Emily Hartley, for six years on the 1970s sitcom “The Bob Newhart Show,” has died. She was 70.

The widow of comic actor Tom Poston, Pleshette died of respiratory failure late Saturday evening at her Los Angeles home, said Robert Finkelstein, an entertainment lawyer and family friend. Pleshette underwent chemotherapy in 2006 for lung cancer.

Poston died in April at age 85.

A stage-trained New York actress who made her movie debut in the 1958 Jerry Lewis comedy “The Geisha Boy,” Pleshette appeared in such films as Alfred Hitchcock’s “The Birds,” “Nevada Smith,” “A Rage to Live” and “Fate Is the Hunter.”

She also appeared with Troy Donahue, to whom she was married for eight months in 1964, in the 1962 romantic drama “Rome Adventure” and the 1964 western “A Distant Trumpet.”

On Broadway in 1961, Pleshette replaced Anne Bancroft in the role of Annie Sullivan in “The Miracle Worker” opposite Patty Duke as Helen Keller.

And on television in 1991, she earned an Emmy Award nomination for playing the title role in the TV-movie “Leona Helmsley: The Queen of Mean.”

But she had a flair for comedy.

Among her screen credits are “If It’s Tuesday, This Must Be Belgium,” “Support Your Local Gunfighter,” “The Shaggy D.A.,” “The Ugly Dachshund” and “Blackbeard’s Ghost.”

Pleshette, however, is best remembered for playing what New York Times critic Frank Rich once described as “the sensible yet woolly wife” on “The Bob Newhart Show,” which ran from 1972 to 1978. Her role as Emily earned her two Emmy Award nominations.

Pleshette briefly retired from acting after marrying her second husband, businessman Tom Gallagher, in 1968. But after hanging around the house for six months, she told TV Guide in 1972, “My loving husband said, ‘You’re getting to be awfully boring. Go back to work.’ ” An appearance on “The Tonight Show” alongside Newhart led to her being cast as his wife.

Pleshette was born Jan. 31, 1937, in New York. Her mother had been a dancer, and her father was the manager of the New York and Brooklyn Paramount theaters during their big-band days.

She first met – and dated – Poston when they appeared together in the 1959 Broadway comedy “Golden Fleecing.” They were both dealing with the deaths of their spouses in 2000 when they got back together and were married the next year.