Short Biography

Suzanne Pleshette achieved television immortality in her role as Bob Newhart`s wife on the 1970s classic situation-comedy "The Bob Newhart Show" (1972). For her role as Emily Hartley, who was married to a psychologist played by Bob Newhart, Pleshette was nominated for the Emmy Award twice, in 1977 and 1978. She also was nominated for an Emmy in 1962 for a guest appearance on the TV series "Dr. Kildare" (1961) and in 1991 for playing the eponymous Leona Helmsley: The Queen of Mean (1990) (TV) in a 1990 TV movie. Her acting career lasted almost 50 years.

Suzanne Pleshette was born on January 31, 1937, in New York, New York, to Eugene Pleshette, a TV network executive who had managed the Paramount Theaters in Manhattan and in Brooklyn during the Big Band era, and the former Geraldine Kaplan, a dancer who performed under the pseudonym Geraldine Rivers.

Blessed with a husky voice and good looks, Pleshette claims that she was not an acting natural, but just "found" herself attending New York City`s High School of the Performing Arts. After graduating high school, she attended Syracuse University for a semester before returning to New York City to go to Finch College, an elite finishing school for well-to-do young ladies. After a semester at Finch, Pleshette dropped out of college to take lessons from famed acting teacher Sanford Meisner at the Neighborhood Playhouse.

She made her Broadway debut in 1957 as part of the supporting cast for the play Compulsion (1959). Initially cast as "The Fourth Girl," she eventually took over the ingénue role during the play`s run.

Blessed with beauty, a fine figure, and a husky voice that made her seem older than her years, she quickly achieved success on both the little and big screens. She made her TV debut at the age of 20 in "Harbourmaster" (1957) in 1957, then was chosen as the female lead opposite superstar Jerry Lewis in his 1958 comedy The Geisha Boy (1958). On Broadway, she replaced Anne Bancroft in the Broadway hit The Miracle Worker (1962).

Once Pleshette started acting, her career never lagged until she was afflicted with cancer.

Her most famous role in cinema was in Alfred Hitchcock`s late classic The Birds (1963), playing the brunette school teacher jilted by the hero of the film, Mitch Brenner (played by Rod Taylor). Contrasted with blonde ice queen Melanie Daniels (played by Tippi Hedren), Pleshette`s Annie Heyworth was as earthy, warm and frankly sexual as Hedren`s Melanie was cold and strangely asexual, something airy and of the sky like the birds that would peck Annie to death near the film`s climax.

Frankly, it is hard to understand how Taylor`s Mitch would jilt Pleshette`s Annie, other than to work out Hitchcock`s dark vision of society and psychosexual relations between the sexes, in which amoral blondes triumph for aesthetic rather than moral reasons.

Still, it is for Emily Hartley she will always be remembered, for both the original show and her part in another show that had the most clever sign-off episode in TV series history. Bob Newhart had enjoyed a second success during the 1980s with his TV sit-com "Newhart" (1982), and when he decided to end that series, he asked Suzanne Pleshette to come back. She did, reprising her tole of Emily in a final episode of Newhart, where Newhart woke up as Bob Hartley from "The Bob Newhart Show" in the bedroom of the Hartley`s Chicago apartment, Pleshette`s Emily at his side. Bob Hartley then

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