Bob Newhart, Legendary TV Star, Dies at 94

One of television’s funniest stars has died. Bob Newhart, who was beloved for his central roles on two long-running and popular sitcoms, passed away on Thursday. He was 94 years old.

His publicist told The Hollywood Reporter that Newhart “died at his Los Angeles home after a series of short illnesses.”

Newhart was something of a late bloomer in show business. Born in 1929, he initially pursued a series of less glamorous jobs. After serving in the Korean War, he got a gig as an accountant, then as a copywriter in the advertising world. To entertain himself when he wasn’t working, he and a friend started audio recording elaborate sketch routines.

The recordings eventually found their way to a radio DJ who helped Newhart get signed to Warner Bros. Records. That led to his first work in showbiz as a stand-up comic. Newhart’s first album, 1960’s The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart, won a Grammy for Album of the Year and became a commercial hit, and included material where Newhart openly mocked his previous line of work. Newhart’s signature persona and dry comic delivery were already firmly in place.

The TV world soon came calling for Newhart, although his early attempts in that medium were not immediate successes. In fact, the first Bob Newhart Show was a variety program that only ran for one year. After numerous guest appearances on other shows like The Tonight Show, The Ed Sullivan Show, and The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, he got his own sitcom at CBS in 1972. This Bob Newhart Show, starring Newhart as a psychologist who has to deal with a variety of patients as well as his home life, became a major hit, running for six seasons through the 1970s.

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His second show lasted even longer. In 1982, Newhart returned to TV with Newhart, this time playing a writer who runs a small town hotel in Vermont. This show lasted for eight seasons and over 180 episodes — including one of the most famous TV finales in the history of the medium.

In Newhart’s final episode, Newhart’s character, Dick Loudon, is struck on the head by a golf ball and collapses. When he wakes up, he’s not Dick anymore; he’s Bob Hartley, Newhart’s character from The Bob Newhart Show. And he’s in bed with Suzanne Pleshette, who played Newhart’s wife on The Bob Newhart Show, rather than his wife from Newhart, Mary Frann. All eight years of Newhart were thus revealed as an elaborate dream in the mind of the character from The Bob Newhart Show. The rapturous reaction from the studio audience sums up the reception this bold series finale received upon its premiere in 1990.

Although Newhart remains best known for his two sitcoms, he had numerous other memorable roles in both film and television. Children of the 1980s and ’90s might recognize him best as the voice of Bernard in Disney’s The Rescuers and The Rescuers Down Under.

On TV, his appearances included work on Desperate Housewives, ER, NCIS, Hot in Cleveland, plus several appearances on The Big Bang Theory as Professor Proton, a Mr. Wizard-like star of a science-based television show that the other characters were fans of as children.

Newhart won an Emmy for his work on The Big Bang Theory, and he won several Grammys for his comedy albums as well. But likely it will be his TV series, and that signature, stammering, low-key delivery, that he will be remembered most for.