Bob Newhart, actor and comedy legend, dies at 94
Bob Newhart, actor and comedy icon, has died. He was 94 years old.
Newhart died after battling a series of short illnesses, according to his publicist, Jerry Digney. Newhart died at his home in Los Angeles on Thursday.
The beloved accountant-turned-comedian was known for his deadpan delivery and is best remembered as the star of two hit TV shows from the 1970s and '80s.
Newhart continued appearing on television occasionally after his fourth sitcom ended and vowed in 2003 that he would work as long as he could.
"It’s been so much, 43 years of my life; (to quit) would be like something was missing," he said.
Bob Newhart during HBO's 13th Annual U.S. Comedy Arts Festiva. (Credit: Jeff Kravitz/FilmMagic, Inc for HBO)
Accountant to comedian
Newhart got into comedy after he became bored with his $5-an-hour accounting job in Chicago, Illinois. To pass the time, he and a friend, Ed Gallagher, began making funny phone calls to each other. Eventually, they decided to record them as comedy routines and sell them to radio stations.
Their efforts failed, but the records came to the attention of Warner Bros., which signed Newhart to a record contract and booked him into a Houston club in February 1960.
"A terrified 30-year-old man walked out on the stage and played his first nightclub," he recalled in 2003.
Stand-up comedy
Newhart gained nationwide fame when his standup comic routine "The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart" was released on vinyl in the 1960s. It went on to win a Grammy Award for album of the year.
‘The Bob Newhart Show’
"The Bob Newhart Show" premiered on Oct. 11, 1961. Despite Emmy and Peabody awards, the half-hour variety show was canceled after one season, a source for jokes by Newhart for decades after.
He waited 10 years before undertaking another "Bob Newhart Show" in 1972. This one was a situation comedy with Newhart playing a Chicago psychologist living in a penthouse with his schoolteacher wife, Suzanne Pleshette. Their neighbors and his patients, notably Bill Daily as an airline navigator, were a wacky, neurotic bunch who provided an ideal counterpoint to Newhart's deadpan commentary.
The series, one of the most acclaimed of the 1970s, ran through 1978.
‘Newhart’
In the early 1980s, after concluding "The Bob Newhart Show," Newhart went on to star in another wildly successful TV series titled "Newhart" on CBS. He played a successful New York writer who decides to reopen a long-closed Vermont inn. The series lasted eight seasons, according to IMDB.
‘Elf,’ ‘Legally Blonde 2’, and more
Over the years, Newhart also appeared in several movies, usually in comedic roles. Among them: "Catch 22," "In and Out," "Legally Blonde 2" and "Elf," as the diminutive dad of adopted full-size son Will Ferrell. More recent work included "Horrible Bosses" and the TV series "The Librarians," "The Big Bang Theory" and "Young Sheldon.
The Associated Press contributed to this report. This story was reported from Los Angeles.