Suzanne Pleshette

Pleshette was born on January 31, 1937, in Brooklyn Heights, Brooklyn, New York, to Eugene Pleshette and Geraldine (née Kaplan).[1] Her parents were Jewish, the children of emigrants from Russia and Austria-Hungary.[2][3] Her mother was a dancer and artist who performed under the stage name Geraldine Rivers. Her father was a stage manager, manager of the Paramount Theater in New York City, of the Paramount Theater in Brooklyn and,[4][5] later, a network executive.[6][7] She graduated from Manhattan's High School of Performing Arts and attended Syracuse University for one semester before transferring to Finch College.[1] She later graduated from Manhattan's prestigious acting school, the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre and was under the tutelage of renowned acting teacher Sanford Meisner.[8][9][10][11][12]

From 1969 to 1980, Pleshette designed sheets for J.P. Stevens & Co.[35][36][37][38] She also wrote screenplays under a pen name.

Pleshette's 1964 marriage to her Rome Adventure and A Distant Trumpet co-star Troy Donahue ended in divorce after just eight months.[39]

Her second husband was oilman Tom Gallagher, to whom she was married from 1968 until his death from lung cancer on January 21, 2000. She suffered a miscarriage during her marriage to Gallagher, and the couple was childless. Asked about children in an October 2000 interview, Pleshette stated: "I certainly would have liked to have had Tommy’s children. But my nurturing instincts are fulfilled in other ways. I have a large extended family; I'm the mother on every set. So if this is my particular karma, that's fine."[40]

In 2001, Pleshette married fellow actor Tom Poston. Poston had been a recurring guest star on The Bob Newhart Show in the 1970s and a Newhart cast member. But long before they worked together on television, Poston and Pleshette had been involved romantically in 1959, when they acted together in the Broadway comedy Golden Fleecing.[9][15] During the subsequent 40 years, they married others but remained friends. After they were both widowed, the deaths of their spouses brought Poston and Pleshette together again, and they married in 2001. They remained married until his death from respiratory failure in Los Angeles on April 30, 2007. She died the following year, and they are buried close to each other.[41][42]

Suzanne Pleshette was the cousin of the actor John Pleshette.

On August 11, 2006, Pleshette's agent Joel Dean announced that she was being treated for lung cancer at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. Three days later, 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 which caused her to remain in the hospital for an extended period of time. She arrived at a Bob Newhart Show cast reunion in September 2007 in a wheelchair, which raised concern about her health although she insisted that she was "cancer-free". (She was seated in a regular chair during the actual telecast.) During an interview in USA Today given at the time of the reunion, Pleshette stated that she had been released four days earlier from the hospital where, as part of her cancer treatment, part of one of her lungs had been removed.[43]

Pleshette died in the early evening of January 19, 2008, twelve days before her 71st birthday, at her Los Angeles home.[1] She is buried close to her third husband, Tom Poston (who died the previous year), in the Hillside Memorial Park Cemetery in Culver City, California. She received a star[44] on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for Television on January 31, 2008, the walk's 2,355th star, which was placed (at her request) in front of Frederick's of Hollywood.[45] Bob Newhart, Arte Johnson, and Marcia Wallace spoke at the star's unveiling which had been planned before Pleshette's death. Tina Sinatra accepted the star on Pleshette's behalf.[46][47]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Suzanne Pleshette.

• Suzanne Pleshette at the Internet Broadway Database
• Suzanne Pleshette at IMDb
• Suzanne Pleshette at the TCM Movie Database
• Suzanne Pleshette at Rotten Tomatoes
• Suzanne Pleshette at AllMovie
• Suzanne Pleshette at The Interviews: An Oral History of Television
• Suzanne Pleshette at Emmys.com
• Suzanne Pleshette at Find a Grave
• Obituary in The Times, 22 January 2008 (subscription required)
• BroadwayWorld Article: Suzanne Pleshette Dies at 70