SUZANNE PLESHETTE
Jan. 31, 1937–Jan. 19, 2008
By Bob Newhart
My feelings about Suzanne? It depends on which Suzanne you are talking about. There were so many of them. She was a wonderful actress who played my wife on The Bob Newhart Show. She was her own woman, which is what she insisted upon. The second Suzy was the one who had a mouth in which battle-heartened veterans would faint on the set. People would say, ''Did she just say what I think she just said?'' The f-word was her favorite. Then, there was the extremely brave Suzy who kept telling people she was fine when she knew she had cancer. It's that old actress thing to not expose anything that could cost you a job. She told me they got it all — all that was left was a one-inch scar — but it turns out it spread to her body and her spine, and she was in terrible pain. We had the 35th Anniversary of The Bob Newhart Show coming up in September 2007, and it was touch and go. We didn't know if she was going to be there, and of course my feeling was if Suzy wasn't there, it would have left a huge hole in the program. But there she was in a wheelchair, the old Suzie. Between that September and the January when she died, she planned her funeral — right down to the music, who would speak, and the women who would carry her casket out of the funeral home. I think I talked about her mouth at the service. Everybody laughed because everybody knew about it. She was a fighter. If there was one word that summed up Suzy, it was that she was a fighter.
Pleshette, 70, died of respiratory failure in L.A.
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