Early Life
Pleshette was born in New York City. Her mother, Geraldine (née Kaplan), was a dancer and artist who performed under the stage name Geraldine Rivers. Her father, Eugene Pleshette, was a stage manager, network executive and manager of the Paramount Theater in Brooklyn, New York.Pleshette was a cousin of Knots Landing actor John Pleshette. She graduated from Manhattan's High School of Performing Arts and then attended Syracuse University.
Acting career
Pleshette appeared in over two dozen made-for-television films and numerous film dramas of the late 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, and was nominated for an Emmy Award several times, most notably for Dr. Kildare. She was 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. Her most memorable film role 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, where 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 a Texas oilman, 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 had no children.
Cancer illness and death
On August 11, 2006, her agent Joel Dean announced that Pleshette was being treated for lung cancer at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. On August 14, 2006, 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." She was later hospitalized for a pulmonary infection and developed pneumonia, causing her to be hospitalized for an extended period. She arrived at a Bob Newhart Show cast reunion in September 2007 in a wheelchair, although she was seated in a chair during the telecast, creating concerns regarding her health, although Pleshette insisted she was "cancer free." During an interview in USA Today given at the time of the reunion, Pleshette stated that she had been released from the hospital four days earlier and as part of her lung cancer treatment had had part of one lung removed.
Susan Pleshette died early in the evening of January 19, 2008 of respiratory failure at her Los Angeles home.
