SUZANNE PLESHETTESuzanne Pleshette, who died on 19 January, 2008, was a spirited American actress known for her roles on television and in Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963).In the classic horror thriller she played Annie Hayworth, a schoolteacher who meets an unfortunate end when a small town is laid siege by flocks of maniacal birds.During the 1970s she was best known in America for her role in The Bob Newhart Show (1972-1978) and in a 47-year career she appeared in numerous classic US TV series, resulting in four Emmy and two Golden Globe nominations.Ms Pleshette was born in Brooklyn on 31 January, 1937. She was part of a showbiz family with a dancing mother, a father who was a theatre manager and network executive, and a cousin who became the actor John Pleshette. She described herself as being "weaned on showbusiness".She attended the High School of Performing Arts in Manhattan, then Syracuse University and several other acting schools. At 20 she made her Broadway debut in Compulsion (based on Meyer Levin’s novel) and began appearing in television adventure shows.When she took over Anne Bancroft’s leading role in the Broadway play, The Miracle Worker, she was the subject of glowing reviews, leading to her first film role, playing a librarian who leaves her job and country in Rome Adventure (1962). The film also starred Troy Donahue, whom she would later marry, as her love interest, and led to her receiving a ‘Most Promising Newcomer’ nomination at the Golden Globes.Despite her vitality and an alluring girl-next-door image, her film career was brief – she starred opposite Tony Curtis in 40 Pounds of Trouble (1962) and then she became one of several leading ladies to die in front of Hitchcock’s cameras in The Birds (1963), her lovelorn character sacrificing herself to save a pupil from the crazed creatures – but by the end of the decade film work seemed to have dried up and she returned to television.Having already shown a flare for comic acting, she landed a role playing Emily Hartley, dry comic Bob Newhart’s supportive but caustic on-screen wife. The sitcom was in the top 20 programmes in America for its first three seasons and Ms Pleshette was twice nominated for the ‘Outstanding Lead Actress in a Comedy Series’ Emmy.Her other television parts included episodes of Gunsmoke, Columbo, The Fugitive, Ironside, Law and Order and several well-received TV plays, including the lead role in Leona Helmsley: The Queen of Mean (1990) which earned her two more award nominations.She had a great passion for acting and continued to work until 2004, appearing in the sitcoms Will & Grace and 8 Simple Rules for Dating My Teenage Daughter, as well as voicing characters in The Lion King II (1998) and Spirited Away (2001).Throughout her life her urbane humour made her a popular chat show guest and she was a regular on The Tonight Show and game show Hollywood Squares.In 2006, she was diagnosed with lung cancer and she began chemotherapy. She died of respiratory failure at the age of 70. She married three times, to Donahue for only a part of 1964, oil barren Tommy Gallagher (1968 until his death in 2000) and then to actor Tom Poston (2001 until his death in 2007) whom she had worked with in a Broadway production in 1959.© Photograph by Alan Light
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