Damn sad, but a full life. RIP indeed. I did always enjoy the story about how she and Tom Poston ended up as a couple:
She first met -- and dated -- Poston when they appeared together in the 1959 Broadway comedy "Golden Fleecing." They were both dealing with the deaths of their spouses in 2000 when they got back together. They were married the next year."They are a romantic duo," actor Tim Conway, a friend of Poston's, told People magazine in 2001. "It's almost embarrassing. You have to put cold water on them."
Poston died in April at age 85 after a brief illness.
― Ned Raggett, Sunday, 20 January 2008 07:16 (eighteen years ago)
We just watched The Birds a few weeks ago at my house, and yes to the ending of Newhart. I am a shade too young to remember The Bob Newhart Show very well, but I know we caught an episode a few years ago and it was hilarious and she was a big part of that.
R.I.P.
― Sara R-C, Sunday, 20 January 2008 07:31 (eighteen years ago)
she was my teenage celebrity crush, when everybody else was lusting after Farrah Fawcett and the angels I was jealous of middle-aged Bob Newhart cause he got to hang out w/Suzanne Pleshette in her pajamas evert week. some kind of oedipal twist? anyway she was a good actress, The Birds is one of my fave Hitchcocks.
rip.
― m coleman, Sunday, 20 January 2008 12:48 (eighteen years ago)
Not to derail, but the Garner Support Your Local... movies were briefly discussed on this thread
And yeah, like my follow old geezers, lovebug starski and Rock Hardy, I may have had some kind of crush on SP.
― James Redd and the Blecchs, Sunday, 20 January 2008 16:50 (eighteen years ago)
NYT:
Moviegoers knew Ms. Pleshette from a string of Hollywood features, and her low-key performances often transcended thankless roles in bad movies. She made her film debut in a 1958 Jerry Lewis comedy, “The Geisha Boy,” in a supporting role as a romantic WAC sergeant. She came to teenage audiences’ attention in her second movie, “Rome Adventure” (1962), a good-girl, bad-girl romance opposite Troy Donahue, the beautiful blond heartthrob of the moment. (Ms. Pleshette played the virgin.) After making another film together in 1964, she and Mr. Donahue married, but the marriage lasted only eight months.
Alfred Hitchcock fans knew Ms. Pleshette best as the pretty small-town teacher who not only loses the guy (Rod Taylor) to the blonde (Tippi Hedren), but is also pecked to death by an angry flock in “The Birds” (1963). Because she was a method actress, “Hitch didn’t know what to do with me,” Ms. Pleshette said in a 1999 Film Quarterly interview with other Hitchcock heroines. “He regretted the day that he hired me.” Many disagreed with that conclusion.
Suzanne Pleshette was born Jan. 31, 1937, in Brooklyn Heights, to Eugene Pleshette, who managed the Paramount and Brooklyn Paramount theaters, and Gloria Kaplan Pleshette, a former dancer.
An only child, Ms. Pleshette attended the New York High School of the Performing Arts, then Syracuse University and transferred to Finch College, on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. She also studied at the Neighborhood Playhouse in New York and with its teaching star Sanford Meisner.
Her professional career began in 1957 with her television debut, a single episode in a short-lived adventure series, “Harbourmaster,” and her Broadway debut in “Compulsion,” a drama about the Leopold and Loeb murder case, in which she played Fourth Girl but soon moved up to a supporting role. In 1959, she appeared in “Golden Fleecing,” a comedy set in Venice, opposite Tom Poston, whom she would marry four decades later.
Her real Broadway triumph came in February 1961 when she replaced Anne Bancroft (who had just won a Tony Award) as Annie Sullivan in “The Miracle Worker,” opposite 14-year-old Patty Duke. Her reviews were admiring.
― Dr Morbius, Wednesday, 23 January 2008 20:22 (eighteen years ago)