Suzanne Pleshette, the actress best known for her six years as Emily Hartley, wife of
Bob Newhart's psychiatrist character Dr. Bob Hartley on his eponymous 1970s CBS situation-comedy series, has died just ten days short of what would have been her 71st birthday, at her Los Angeles home of respiratory failure arising from a years-long struggle with lung cancer. (Thanks to
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
sdelmonte for the tip.)
Not many remember these days, but long before Bob came along, she was
Rod Taylor's co-star in
Alfred Hitchcock's classic suspense film,
The Birds. She also appeared in a comedy film,
If It's Tuesday, This Must Be Belgium, and as the late, largely unlamented
Leona Helmsley in a made-for-TV biopic. She performed on Broadway and was the original choice to play Catwoman in the 1960s
Batman TV series, before the producers settled on
Julie Newmar. (Courtesy of
IMDB's page on her.) She was nominated several times for Emmys and Golden Globes, and that she never won is to both organizations' eternal shame.
She was quoted as saying in 1955, ""I don't sit around and wait for great parts. I'm an actress, and I love being one, and I'll probably be doing it till I'm 72, standing around the back lot doing
Gunsmoke." Ironically, she outlasted that long-running Eye Network series by at least three decades...but missed her goal by just over a year.
She was a fondly remembered part of my TV-soaked childhood, and I will miss her greatly.
