I was sorry to read today of the death of Suzanne Pleshette. She used to be a favorite actress of mine.
I’m also a little disappointed by the obituaries, including the one by Associated Press which indicated that her primary claim to fame was her TV comedy series role as psychologist Bob Hartley’s wife. I suppose that’s true if all you’ve seen for the past thirty-five years is TV comedy reruns. A successful, long-running TV comedy is nothing to sneeze at. But that doesn’t excuse whoever wrote the obituaries. An entire generation of us grew up watching Suzanne Pleshette in movies and television. I may have only been a kid then, but I knew her name better than I knew Bob Newhart’s well before Ms. Pleshette played the part of Emily Hartley in The Bob Newhart Show. No offense to Bob Newhart, whom I admire as well, but the primary reason I began watching that series when it first aired was that I already knew Suzanne Pleshette’s name.
At least the obituaries mentioned her appearance in Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds; but what about Fate is the Hunter with Glenn Ford, Nancy Kwan, and Rod Taylor? What about Youngblood Hawke with James Franciscus, and 40 Pounds of Trouble with Tony Curtis? Not to mention one of my favorites, Support Your Local Gunfighter with James Garner. What about all her other movie and TV roles? Are newspapers only writing obituaries these days for people under thirty, or only for TV viewers?
To all of you younger people out there, Suzanne Pleshette was a great actress and a beautiful lady, and she was famous through the sixties, before she ever made that TV series you know most about.
Another important credit, perhaps the most interesting one to some younger people who haven’t seen her early movies, is that Suzanne Pleshette was the voice of sisters Yubaba and Zeniba in the 2001 Academy Award winning Spirited Away, the English language version of Japanese anime classic, Sen to Chihiro no kamikakushi. I plan to watch Spirited Away on DVD tonight, in her honor.
