
Bob Newhart
Jeff Kravitz/FilmMagic
Bob Newhart, the beloved stand-up performer whose quirky, deadpan humor on two critically acclaimed CBS sitcoms earned him a place among the greatest comedians of all time, died Thursday morning. He was 94.
Legendary Chicago musician Bob Newhart, who won Grammy Awards for Album of the Year and Best New Artist for his 1960 breakthrough album “The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart,” has died at his Los Angeles home after a lengthy battle with illness, his longtime publicist Jerry Digney announced.
The former accountant famously didn’t win an Emmy until 2013, when he finally won the award for his guest role as Arthur Jeffries (aka Professor Proton, the former children’s science show host) on CBS’s “The Big Bang Theory.”
In 1972, MTM Enterprises cast the down-to-earth comedian as Bob Hartley, a clinical psychologist with a practice in real-life Newhart’s favorite city, Chicago. The Bob Newhart Show became one of the most popular sitcoms of all time, featuring a stellar supporting cast that included Suzanne Pleshette, Peter Bonners, Marcia Wallace, Bill Daly and Jack Riley.
Newhart left the series after 142 episodes in 1978. Incredibly, he wasn’t nominated for an Emmy, nor did the show win one, as he felt the show had run out of talent. However, he returned to CBS in 1982 to star in another MTM comedy.
On Newhart, he played Dick Loudon, a New York writer turned proprietor of the Stratford Inn in Vermont. The show ran for eight popular seasons and again had a great cast, including Mary Fran, Tom Poston (who later married Pleshette), Julia Duffy, Peter Scolari, and William Sanderson as “Larry, Darryl and Another Brother Darryl,” Tony Papenfuss, and John Voldstad.
In one of the most acclaimed series endings in history, Newhart concluded its eight-season run with a cheeky final scene in which Loudon wakes up in the middle of the night as Bob Hartley in bed with Pleshette in his Chicago apartment, suggesting his entire second series had been a dream.
Newhart’s silences and stammers were one of his trademarks, and his sarcastic observations were the result of his observant personality.
“I tend to find humor in the macabre. I’d say 85 percent of me is what you see on the show, and the other 15 percent is a very sick, very disturbed person,” he told Los Angeles magazine in a 1990 interview.
He was inducted into the Television Academy of Arts and Sciences Hall of Fame in 1992.
George Robert Newhart was born on September 5, 1929, in Oak Park, Illinois. He grew up a Cubs fan, and attended the team’s victory parade down LaSalle Street after Chicago won the National League pennant in 1945. (Naturally, he was ecstatic when the Cubs ended a 108-year World Series drought by winning in 2016.)
Newhart never dreamed of being in show business – in fact, such a glamorous profession would have been contrary to his Midwestern character, which is probably why he was so connected to Midwest America.
Mr. Newhart attended St. Ignatius College Prep and then earned a business degree from Loyola University. He served two years in the Army and then dropped out of law school. He then worked as an accountant for U.S. Gypsum and then for Glidden, a paint distributor.
“Somehow there’s a connection between numbers, music and comedy. I don’t know what it is, but I know there is one,” he once said in an interview with a college business professor. “For comedians, you know that two and two add up to five. You put this fact together with that fact and you get this ridiculous fact.”
To ease the tedium of the job, Newhart and friends would make prank calls for fun, which he eventually refined into his signature comedy of one-sided phone conversations (where the audience had to guess what the other person was like).
He and his friends also sold a radio show, broadcasting five minutes of comedy five days a week for $7.50 a week.
Another friend, a Chicago disc jockey, introduced Newhart to an executive at Warner Bros. Records in 1959. An accountant and copywriter at the time, he had only three routines but developed more and won a record deal.
“You have to remember, when I started out in the late ’50s, I didn’t say to myself, ‘Oh, this is a big void to fill. I’m going to be a balding ex-accountant who specializes in understated humor,'” he said. “It was just who I was, and where my heart had always been headed, so it was just natural for me to do that.”
Recorded live in a Houston nightclub, The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart became the first comedy album to reach the top of the album charts and became one of the best-selling “talk” albums, selling 1.5 million copies. It included classics like “Abe Lincoln vs. Madison Avenue” and “Driving Instructor.”
Coming at a time when controversial, outrageous comedians like Lenny Bruce and Mort Sahl were on the rise, “The Button-Down Mind” earned Newhart his third Grammy for Best Comedy Performance, and suddenly he was appearing on The Ed Sullivan Show.
After two more successful albums, Newhart was offered a weekly television variety series in 1961 and 1962. The first, “The Bob Newhart Show,” won an Emmy and a Peabody Award for outstanding program in humor that year.
But Newhart quickly became exhausted: “Even though I had a great producing team, I was solely responsible for the show 24 hours a day, seven days a week,” he once said.
He turned down offers for a number of sitcom roles, returning to nightclubs and honing his acting chops with television guest appearances and film work, first in Don Siegel’s Hell Is for Heroes (1962) starring Steve McQueen, then in Hot Millions (1968), Mike Nichols’ Catch-22 (1970), and Norman Lear’s Cold Turkey (1971).
Dave Davies and Lorenzo Music, co-creators of The Newhart Show, had wanted to get involved with the comic for some time.
“Lorenzo and I wrote a segment for Bob on ‘Love, American Style,’ but Bob wasn’t available, so we brought in Sid Caesar. A few years later, I wrote for Bob on ‘The Mary Tyler Moore Show,’ but Bob wasn’t available either,” Davis told THR in an oral history of the sitcom. “After I became story editor on Mary’s show, MTM Enterprises decided to branch out and asked Lorenzo and me to produce a pilot. We knew exactly what we wanted: We wanted a show with Bob in it.”
Newhart said, “Arthur Price (co-founder of MTM) was my manager. He asked me if I’d be interested. I’d been traveling as a stand-up comedian for 12 years, mostly for one-night shows and then the next day I’d be somewhere 5,300 miles away. I wanted a normal life where I could be at home with my family.”
“I didn’t ask for much. I just didn’t want the show to be about a goofy dad that everyone loves and gets himself into trouble and his wife and kids have to help each other out.”
In 1992, he appeared in another new series, “Bob,” in which he played a cult comic book writer, but audiences flopped, as did “George & Leo,” in which he played a bookstore owner opposite Judd Hirsch.
Newhart appeared in three episodes of NBC’s ER, playing a doctor who develops macular degeneration (for which he was again nominated for an Emmy), and on ABC’s Desperate Housewives as Morty Frickman, husband of Lesley Ann Warren’s character.
Most recently, Newhart played Judson in The Librarians trilogy of TV movies and later the TNT series.
Newhart’s other credits include Little Miss Marker (1980), Buck Henry’s First Family (1980) as the President (with Gilda Radner as his feisty daughter), Elf (2003) as Papa Elf, and Horrible Bosses (2011). He also lent his flat Midwestern accent to the voice acting in two Rescue Team films.
Chicago honored him with a statue on Michigan Avenue near the office building featured in the opening credits of The Bob Newhart Show, which depicts Newhart seated in a chair with a vacant psychiatrist’s couch next to him. The statue was later moved to Navy Pier.
In 2002, he became the fifth recipient of the Kennedy Center’s American Humor Award, and four years later published a memoir, I Shouldn’t Even Be Doing This.
Newhart was married to Virginia “Ginny” Quinn (daughter of character actor Bill Quinn) from January 1963 until his death at age 82 in April 2023. The two were set up on a blind date by comedian Buddy Hackett (Ginny was babysitting Hackett’s children).
“Buddy came back one day and said, in his inimitable way, ‘I met this young man named Bobby Newhart, and he’s a comedian and he’s Catholic, and you’re Catholic, so I think you should probably get married,'” she recalled in a 2013 interview.
It was at a Christmas party that Pleshette happened to be attending that she came up with the idea for the brilliant ending to Newhart’s show.
The Newharts were close friends with Don Rickles and his wife, Barbara, and the two often vacationed together.
He is survived by his children, Robert Jr., Timothy, Courtney and Jennifer, and 10 grandchildren.