Suzanne Pleshette didn't end up becoming famous as a movie actress, but she was my first movie crush. I'd like to say my first exposure to her was in The Birds—it'd be the auteurist thing—but it wasn't, it was the rather less distinguished 1969 If It's Tuesday, It Must Be Belgium, the package tour comedy costarring, among others, Ian McShane AND Norman Fell. Which film I saw, as was the case with most movies when I was nine or ten, at the drive in, with my parents. My two most vivid memories of the film are the tourists getting their pre-travel injections (of what I have no idea) and her: violet eyes, bright smile, husky voice. Of course when she turned up as Bob's wife on The Bob Newhart Show I followed. I was happy recently to learn that she had found marital bliss with Newhart costar Tom Poston, and sad to learn today that she died after a battle with lung cancer. She would have been 71 on the 31st of this month. She really was a fine actress...as her really subtle and poignant work in The Birds—the only time, I think, she played the loser in a romantic/sexual rivalry—testifies.
Now I must be off to interview Colin Hanks and Sean McGinly, of The Great Buck Howard, try and catch up on my blogging, and so forth. But I wanted to leave note of my affection and esteem for Ms. Pleshette before setting back out into the Sundance squall.
Tom Poston died April 2007. Very sad on both accounts.
Posted by: Tess | January 20, 2008 at 10:59 AM
Tess, Poston's passing totally—unconscionably!—slipped my mind. (Told you Sundance was a poor place for blogging.)He too was a great comic actor, an innovator really, who I wish had done more film work. He's terrific in the underrated "Soldier in the Rain."
Posted by: Glenn Kenny | January 20, 2008 at 11:46 AM
Absolutely, Glenn. I had just posted something on my site when I saw your appreciation. It might be expected to lose Vampira at 86 (or Brad Renfro at 25, after more than a decade of hard living) but losing Suzanne Pleshette at 70 just felt unfair.
I, too, probably saw her first in some godawful Disney matinee crud -- "Blackbeard's Ghost," perhaps? -- but she is superb in "The Birds." In some ways, it's a distillation of the persona she projected all her life -- worldly, weary but still approachable, still warm.
Personally I've always been a fan, not of the dumb blondes, but the smart brunettes -- Brooke Adams, Karen Allen, Debra Winger -- and in her own way, Pleshette was one of the templates. If she didn't get a chance to do more that's Hollywood's fault, not hers.
Posted by: swhitty | January 20, 2008 at 03:16 PM
For me, it's her pistol-packing hothead in Burt Kennedy's sadly underrated SUPPORT YOUR LOCAL GUNFIGHTER. And even in late-life stuff like "Good Morning, Miami," she could still spit out a one-liner like nobody's business ("I just got rear-ended by a black Escort." "I really need to hear the words 'auto accident.'"). In an era dominated by helium-voiced, brain-dead Barbie dolls, she was almost the last of her breed.
Posted by: cadavra | January 21, 2008 at 06:37 PM