Bob Newhart, the deadpan accountant-turned-comedian who became one of the most popular TV personalities of his time after striking gold with a classic comedy album, died at 94.
Bob Newhart’s publicist, Jerry Digney, says the actor died Thursday in Los Angeles following a series of brief illnesses.
Bob Newhart, best known today as the star of two famous 1970s and 1980s television sitcoms bearing his name, began his career as a stand-up comedian in the late 1950s.
He rose to national prominence when his routine was recorded on vinyl in 1960 as “The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart,” which won the Grammy Award for album of the year.
While other comedians of the day, such as Lenny Bruce, Mort Sahl, Alan King, Mike Nichols, and Elaine May, regularly garnered laughs with their forceful attacks on current norms, Bob Newhart was an exception.
His attitude was modern, but he rarely spoke above a timid, even stammering tone. His only prop was a telephone, which he used to pretend to converse with someone on the other end of the line.
In one memorable skit, he played a Madison Avenue image-maker who urged Abraham Lincoln to stop tampering with the Gettysburg Address and stick to the script written by his speechwriters.
“You changed four scores and seven to 87?” Newhart asks in disbelief. “Abe, that’s supposed to be a grabber…” It’s like Mark Antony saying, ‘Friends, Romans, countrymen, I’ve got something to tell you.'”
Another favorite was “Merchandising the Wright Brothers,” in which he attempted to persuade the aviation pioneers to launch an airline despite acknowledging that the distance of their first flight might limit them.
“Well, see, that’s going to hurt our time to the Coast if we’ve got to land every 105 feet.”
Bob Newhart initially hesitated to join a weekly television series, thinking it would overexpose his material. Nevertheless, he accepted an enticing offer from NBC, and “The Bob Newhart Show” debuted on October 11, 1961.
Despite receiving Emmy and Peabody awards, the half-hour variety program was canceled after one season, but it became a source of Newhart’s gags for decades afterward.
He waited ten years before doing another “Bob Newhart Show” in 1972. This was a situation comedy starring Newhart as a Chicago psychotherapist who lives in a penthouse with his schoolteacher wife, Suzanne Pleshette.
Their neighbors and his patients, particularly Bill Daily, an airline navigator, were a crazy, neurotic group who provided an excellent backdrop to Newhart’s deadpan remarks.
The series, one of the most celebrated of the 1970s, ran until 1978.
Four years later, the comedian debuted another show, “Newhart.” This time, he was a successful New York writer who decided to reopen a Vermont inn that had been closed for many years. Again, Newhart stood out as the calm, rational man among strange locals. Again, the show was a big success, spanning eight seasons on CBS.
It ended unforgettably in 1990, with Newhart waking up in bed with Pleshette as his old Chicago psychologist character, wincing as he tells her about his bizarre dream: “I was an innkeeper in this insane tiny hamlet in Vermont. The handyman continued missing the point, and then there were three woodsmen, but only one spoke!”
The stunt was a parody of a “Dallas” episode in which a main character was killed off and then revived when it was discovered that the death was a dream.
Two subsequent series were comparative duds: “Bob,” 1992-93, and “George & Leo,” 1997-98. Despite multiple nominations, his only Emmy was for a cameo appearance on “The Big Bang Theory.” “I suppose they think I am not acting. That it’s simply Bob being Bob,” he moaned at not receiving television’s highest prize during his prime.
Newhart has also appeared in several films, most of which are comedies. Among them are “Catch 22,” “In and Out,” “Legally Blonde 2,” and “Elf,” as the small father of adoptive full-size son Will Ferrell. More recent work includes “Horrible Bosses,” the TV series “The Librarians,” and the “The Big Bang Theory” spin-off “Young Sheldon.”
After his fourth sitcom ended, Bob Newhart continued appearing on television occasionally and swore to work as long as possible in 2003.
“It’s been so much, 43 years of my life; (to quit) would be like something was missing,” remarked the actor.
Source: AP News
