Suzanne Pleshette died this past week, at the age of seventy, after a long bout with cancer. The husky-voiced Brooklyn-born actress, who James Wolcott once likened to "a beautiful black swan", made her stage debut in 1957 in Ira Levin's Compulsion and would go on to successfully replace Anne Bancroft in the original Broadway production of The Miracle Worker. She made her film debut in 1958 in Jerry Lewis's The Geisha Boy , and would go on to give affecting supporting performances in Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds, Nevada Smith with Steve McQueen, If It's Tuesday, This Must Be Belgium, and the minor camp classic Youngblood Hawke, in which, as the editor of the title character, the great novelist (author of Alms for Oblivion) played by James Franciscus, she got to adjust her eyeglasses while staring at his manly form and ask, "Should I call you Youngy or Bloody?" Perhaps fearing that anything else Hollywood had to offer would seem anticlimactic after a beaut like that, Pleshette spent more and more of her time acting on television; eventually, of course, she would become most closely associated with her role on one of the great sitcoms of the 1970s, The Bob Newhart Show, where for five seasons she pulled off the neat trick of being stylish and funny while making it seem plausible that her potato-like co-star was a sexual being.
Most of the rest of her career was spent on TV: she played inappropriately loving mother of young Tom Berenger in the controversial 1979 TV film Flesh & Blood, glued black caterpillars to her eyebrows for the title role in Leona Helmsley: The Queen of Mean (1990), and had recurring, motherly roles on such comedies as Good Morning, Miami, 8 Simple Rules for Dating My Teenage Daughter, and Will & Grace. She also made the occasional return trip to the movie screen; most of her film roles were forgettable, but she did get a piece of one great movie towards the end of her career when she voiced the characters of Yubaba and Zeniba in the English language version of Hayao Miyazaki's 2001 animated masterpiece, Spirited Away. That same year, she married the actor Tom Poston, with whom she had appeared more than forty years earlier in the Broadway play Golden Fleecing (and who would be a regular on Newhart's second long-running sitcom,Newhart). Poston himself died last year. Suzanne Pleshette will posthumously receive a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame on January 31, which would have been her seventy-first birthday.
