While she will likely be best remembered as Bob Newhart’s raspy-voiced wife on “The Bob Newhart Show” I will never forget how hilarious Suzanne Pleshette was playing Karen’s mom Lois On “Will & Grace.” Too funny. Sadly those laughs have been silenced today, as news comes that Pleshette has died at age 70.
According to Pleshette’s attorney and friend, the actress died of respiratory failure last night at her Los Angeles home. Pleshette underwent chemotherapy for lung cancer in 2006 and never quite regained her strength.
Pleshette would have turned 71 on January 31st and by all accounts she led a very full life. She was born in 1937 in New York City and started her career on Broadway in the late 1950s. Among her most notable Broadway roles was replacing Anne Bancroft in “The Miracle Worker.”
She met her future husband, Tom Poston, when they appeared together in the 1959 Broadway comedy “The Golden Fleecing,” but didn’t marry him until 2001 after she divorced or outlived two previous husbands.
From Broadway Pleshette moved to the big screen and launched her film career with Jerry Lewis in “The Geisha Boy.” From there she went on to appear in films such as Alfred Hitchcock’s “The Birds” and the Disney comedies “The Ugly Dachshund,””Blackbeard’s Ghost” and “The Adventures of Bullwhip Griffin.”
The actress also had a busy career in TV. She appeared on numerous television shows, including “Have Gun, Will Travel,””Alfred Hitchcock Presents,””Playhouse 90” and “Naked City.” More recently she played the title role in 1990’s “Leona Helmsley, the Queen of Mean” and also had guest roles in several episodes of the TV sitcoms “Will & Grace” and “8 Simple Rules … For Dating My Teenage Daughter.”
Pleshette was nominated for four Emmy Awards over 30 years. Two of them for best TV comedy actress for her stint on “The Bob Newhart Show.”