LOS ANGELES (AP) — Bob Newhart, the deadpan accountant turned comedian who became one of the most popular entertainers TV one of the stars of his era after striking gold with a classic comedy album, has died at the age of 94.
Jerry Digney, Newhart’s publicist, said the actor died Thursday in Los Angeles after a series of brief illnesses.
NewhartBest known today as the star of two hit television shows of the 1970s and 1980s that bore his name, he launched his comedy career in the late 1950s. He gained national fame when his act was recorded on vinyl in 1960 as “The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart,” which won a Grammy Award for Album of the Year.
While other comedians of the era, including Lenny Bruce, Mort Sahl, Alan King, Mike Nichols and Elaine May, often drew laughs with their aggressive attacks on modern mores, Newhart was an anomaly. His outlook was modern, but he rarely raised his voice above a hesitant, almost stuttering tone. His only prop was a telephone, which he used to pretend to be holding a conversation with someone on the other end.
In one memorable sketch, he played a Madison Avenue image maker urging Abraham Lincoln to stop editing the Gettysburg Address and stick to his speechwriters’ draft.
“You changed eighty-seven to 87?” Newhart asks incredulously. “Abe, that’s supposed to be a hook… It’s like Mark Antony saying, ‘Friends, Romans, countrymen, I have something to say to you.’”
Another favorite was “Merchandising the Wright Brothers,” in which he tried to persuade the aviation pioneers to start an airline, even though he recognized that the distance of their maiden flight might limit them.
“Well, you see, it’s going to hurt our arrival time on shore if we have to land every 105 feet.”
FILE – Bob Newhart, center, poses with cast and crew members of “The Bob Newhart Show,” from top left, Marcia Wallace, Bill Daily, Jack Riley and Suzanne Pleshette, foreground left, and Dick Martin during TV Land’s 35th anniversary tribute to “The Bob Newhart Show” on Sept. 5, 2007, in Beverly Hills, California. Newhart, the deadpan master of sitcoms and phone-in monologues, died in Los Angeles on Thursday, July 18, 2024. He was 94. (AP Photo/Mark J. Terrill, File)
At first, Newhart was reluctant to sign on for a weekly television series, fearing it would overexpose his work. He nevertheless accepted a tempting offer from NBC, and “The Bob Newhart Show” premiered on October 11, 1961. Despite Emmy and Peabody Awards, the half-hour variety show was canceled after one season, a source of jokes for Newhart for decades.
He waited ten years before landing another “Bob Newhart Show” in 1972. It was a sitcom in which Newhart played a Chicago psychologist living in a penthouse with his schoolteacher wife, Suzanne Pleshette. Their neighbors and patients, including Bill Daily as an airline navigator, were a bunch of neurotic lunatics who provided an ideal counterpoint to Newhart’s deadpan commentary.
FILE – Bob Newhart, winner of the Mark Twain Prize for Humor, receives a round of applause at the Kennedy Center in Washington, Oct. 29, 2002. Bob Newhart, the deadpan master of sitcoms and phone-in monologues, died in Los Angeles on Thursday, July 18, 2024. He was 94. (AP Photo/Lawrence Jackson, File)
The series, one of the most acclaimed of the 1970s, aired until 1978.
Four years later, the comedian launched another show, simply titled “Newhart.” This time, he played a successful New York writer who decides to reopen a long-closed Vermont inn. Newhart again played a calm, reasonable man surrounded by a group of local eccentrics. The show was again a huge success, and ran for eight seasons on CBS.
The film ended memorably in 1990, when Newhart, in his old Chicago psychologist persona, wakes up in bed with Pleshette, grimacing as he tells her about the strange dream he had: “I was an innkeeper in a crazy little town in Vermont. … The handyman had nothing to do with it, and then there were these three lumberjacks, but only one of them talked!”
The stunt parodied an episode of “Dallas” where a key character was killed, then reanimated when it turned out the death had occurred in a dream.
Two other shows were comparative failures: “Bob,” in 1992-93, and “George & Leo,” in 1997-98. Although nominated several times, his only Emmy was for a guest role on “The Big Bang Theory.” “I guess they think I’m not acting. That it’s just Bob being Bob,” he sighed of not winning television’s highest honor in his heyday.
FILE – Actor and comedian Bob Newhart sits next to a bronze statue of Dr. Bob Hartley, the character he played on the sitcom “The Bob Newhart Show” from 1972 to 1978, during the statue’s unveiling in Chicago on July 27, 2004. Newhart, the deadpan master of sitcoms and phone-in monologues, died in Los Angeles on Thursday, July 18, 2024. He was 94. (AP Photo/M. Spencer Green, File)
Over the years, Newhart has also appeared in several films, usually in comedic roles. Among them: “Catch-22,” “In and Out,” “Legally Blonde 2” and “Elf,” playing the baby father of his adopted son Will Ferrell. His more recent work includes “Horrible Bosses” and the television series “The Librarians” and the “Big Bang Theory” spin-off “Young Sheldon.”
Newhart married Virginia Quinn, known to his friends as Ginny, in 1964, and remained with her until his death in 2023They had four children: Robert, Timothy, Jennifer and Courtney. Newhart was a frequent guest of Johnny Carson and liked to tease the thrice-divorced “Tonight” host by telling him…
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