Suzanne Pleshette

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Pleshette in 1991

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 1970s.

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.

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 in the Hitchcock classic The Birds.

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.

Pleshette's first marriage was in 1964, to her Rome Adventure co-star Troy Donahue; they divorced acrimoniously eight months later. She married Tommy Gallagher, who was not affiliated with the entertainment industry, in 1968 and they remained married until his death from lung cancer on January 21, 2000. She has never had children. In 2001, Suzanne married a former co-star, comic actor Tom Poston (b. 1921) 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).

On August 11, 2006, her agent Joel Dean announced that she was being treated for lung cancer from Cedars-Sinai Medical Center where the cancer was diagnosed (see [1]).

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."

However, according to the tabloid The Globe (dated August 28, 2006):

"...[s]he has now been told it has spread to her lymph nodes."