SUZANNE PLESHETTE

'Suzanne Pleshette' (born January 31 1937 in New York City) is an American actress, best known as "Emily Hartley" on ''The Bob Newhart Show'' in the '70s.

Contents

Early life

Acting career

Personal life

Selected filmography

External links

Early life

Born to Eugene Pleshette, manager of the Paramount Theater in Brooklyn, New York and dancer Geraldine Kaplan, she is a cousin of ''Knots Landing'' actor John Pleshette. Pleshette graduated from Manhattan's School of Performing Arts. She then attended Syracuse University.

Acting career

Pleshette has been in over two dozen made-for-television films and numerous film dramas of the late '50s, '60s and '70s. She has been nominated for an Emmy Award several times, most notably for ''Dr. Kildare''.
Pleshette is a former Broadway leading lady, having replaced Anne Bancroft in ''The Miracle Worker'' opposite Patty Duke to rave reviews. She also provided the voices of Yubaba and Zeniba in the English dub of Japanese director Hayao Miyazaki's Academy Award winning film ''Spirited Away''. Perhaps the most memorable of her film roles was that of schoolteacher Annie Hayworth in the Alfred Hitchcock film ''The Birds'' (1963).
She appeared in the ABC sitcom ''8 Simple Rules'' after John Ritter's death in September 2003; she played the mother of Katey Sagal's character. She has also guest-starred in several episodes of the NBC sitcom ''Will & Grace'' as the estranged mother of Megan Mullally's character Karen Walker. Pleshette also starred in several other television series, including ''Suzanne Pleshette Is Maggie Briggs'', ''Bridges to Cross'', ''Nightingales'', ''The Boys Are Back'', and ''Good Morning, Miami''. One of her most memorable roles on television was on the final episode of ''Newhart'', in which viewers discovered the entire series had been a dream of Bob Hartley. He wakes up in an identical bedroom from the set of ''The Bob Newhart Show'' next to none other than Pleshette.

Personal life

Pleshette's first marriage was in 1964, to her ''Rome Adventure'' co-star Troy Donahue. They divorced acrimoniously eight months later. She then married Tommy Gallagher, who was not in the entertainment industry, in 1968, and they remained married until his death from lung cancer on January 21, 2000. In 2001, Suzanne married former co-star Tom Poston who played "The Peeper", a college friend of Bob Hartley on ''The Bob Newhart Show'', as well as George Utley, the handyman on Newhart's next series, ''Newhart''. They remained married until his death on April 30, 2007 in Los Angeles after a brief illness. She has no children.
On August 11, 2006, her agent Joel Dean announced that she was being treated for lung cancer at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. On August 14 2006, the ''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."

Selected filmography

★ ''The Geisha Boy'' (1958)

★ ''Rome Adventure'' (1962)

★ ''40 Pounds Of Trouble'' (1962)

★ ''The Birds'' (1963)

★ ''Wall Of Noise'' (1963)

★ ''A Distant Trumpet'' (1964)

★ ''Fate Is the Hunter'' (1964)

★ ''Youngblood Hawke'' (1964)

★ ''A Rage To Live'' (1965)

★ ''The Ugly Dachshund'' (1966)

★ ''Nevada Smith'' (1966)

★ ''Mister Buddwing'' (1966)

★ ''The Adventures Of Bullwhip Griffin'' (1967)

★ ''Blackbeard's Ghost'' (1968)

★ ''The Power'' (1968)

★ ''If It's Tuesday, This Must Be Belgium'' (1969)

★ ''Suppose They Gave A War And Nobody Came?'' (1970)

★ ''Support Your Local Gunfighter!'' (1970)

★ ''The Shaggy D.A.'' (1976)

★ ''Hot Stuff'' (1979)

★ ''Oh, God Book II'' (1980)

★ '' (1985)

★ '' (1998; (voice of Zira)

★ ''Spirited Away'' (2001)

External links

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