This page uses content from the Suzanne Pleshette biography page on the English version of Wikipedia and is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. This list of authors can be seen in the page history. Rotten Tomatoes disclaims any and all warranties as to the accuracy or reliability of the content.

Suzanne Pleshette (born January 31 1937) is an American actress, best known as "Emily Hartley" on The Bob Newhart Show in the 1970s.

Born to bellhop Eugene Pleshette and dancer Gloria Kaplan, she is a cousin of Knots Landing actor John Pleshette. Pleshette graduated from Manhattan's School of Performing Arts.

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 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". It appears that this is not the case. According to The Globe (postdated August 28, 2006):

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

In addition the story stated that Pleshette's husband of 5 years, actor Tom Poston, is himself battling thyroid cancer.

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)
• The Shaggy D.A. (1976)
• Hot Stuff (1979)
• Oh, God! Book II (1980) (TV Movie)
• Kojak: The Belarus File (1985)
• The Lion King II: Simba's Pride (1998; voice of Zira)
• Spirited Away (2001)

External links

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