Bob Newhart, 94, Dies; Soft-Spoken Everyman Became a Comedy Star

Bob Newhart, who burst onto the comedy scene in 1960 working a stammering Everyman character not unlike himself, then rode essentially that same character through a long, busy career that included two of television’s most memorable sitcoms, died on Thursday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 94.

His publicist, Jerry Digney, confirmed the death.

Mr. Newhart wasn’t merely unknown a few months before his emergence as a full-fledged star; he was barely in the business, though he had aspirations. In 1959, some comic tapes he had made to amuse himself while working as an accountant in Chicago caught the ear of an executive at Warner Bros. Records, which in 1960 released the comedy album “The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart.”

The record shot to No. 1 on the charts, and at the 1961 Grammy Awards it improbably captured the top prize, album of the year. Among the nominees Mr. Newhart bested: Nat King Cole, Harry Belafonte and Frank Sinatra.

He won two other Grammys that year as well, for best new artist and best spoken-word comedy performance, an honor that was given not to his first album but to his second, a hastily made follow-up titled “The Button-Down Mind Strikes Back!” For a while, his first two albums occupied the top two spots on the Billboard album chart.

“Playboy magazine hailed me ‘the best new comedian of the decade,’” Mr. Newhart wrote in his autobiography, “I Shouldn’t Even Be Doing This: And Other Things That Strike Me as Funny” (2006), describing this period. “Of course, there were still nine more years left in the decade.”

A Quick Transition

Unlike many entertainers who achieve fame almost overnight, Mr. Newhart was able to handle the unexpected success of the “Button-Down Mind” albums. He transitioned quickly and easily into television, landing a short-lived variety show, numerous guest appearances on the shows of Dean Martin and Ed Sullivan, regular work guest-hosting for Johnny Carson on “The Tonight Show” and, ultimately, “The Bob Newhart Show,” a celebrated sitcom in which he played a somewhat befuddled psychologist.

That series ran from 1972 to 1978, and in 1982 he followed it up with “Newhart,” another successful sitcom, in which he played a Vermont innkeeper. “Newhart” ran for eight seasons and ended with what is still viewed as one of the greatest finales in television history.

Mr. Newhart remained busy in television and films into his 80s. He won an Emmy in 2013 for a guest appearance as the beloved former host of a TV science show on “The Big Bang Theory.” He was nominated again for the same role a year later but lost to Jimmy Fallon, who won for hosting an episode of “Saturday Night Live.” And he reprised the role a few times, most recently in a 2020 voice-over, on the “Big Bang Theory” prequel series “Young Sheldon.”

That Emmy was, surprisingly, his first. He had been nominated but winless at the Emmys of 1962, for writing; 1985, 1986 and 1987, as lead actor in a comedy (“Newhart”); 2004, as guest actor in a drama series, for his role in three episodes of “ER” as an architect losing his sight; and 2009, for his supporting role in the TV movie “The Librarian: The Curse of the Judas Chalice.”

Though he personally did not win an Emmy until he had been on television for half a century, his variety show — which ran for a single season in 1961-62 and which, like his later sitcom, was called “The Bob Newhart Show” — did win, in a category then called outstanding program achievement in the field of humor. It beat out “The Andy Griffith Show,” “The Red Skelton Show,” “Hazel” and “Car 54, Where Are You?”

“I think the whole awards-giving process needs rethinking,” Mr. Newhart wrote in his autobiography. “For starters, they should bestow lifetime achievement awards at the beginning of a performer’s career. This way the person can still enjoy it while he is young, rather than giving it to him when he has lost most of his marbles and is standing onstage wondering why all these overdressed people are applauding.”

Nonetheless, he did not object when in 2002 he was given the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor.

From Accountant to Comedian

George Robert Newhart was born on Sept. 5, 1929, in Oak Park, Ill. His father, who worked for a plumbing and heating contractor, was also named George, which is how Bob came to be known as Bob, though at first that was true only among his family, for clarity’s sake.

George David Newhart and his wife, Pauline, had three other children as well, all girls, and sent Bob and his sisters, Virginia, Mary Joan and Pauline, to Roman Catholic schools in the Chicago area. “My family didn’t have much money so we didn’t go to Florida” to escape the Chicago winters, Mr. Newhart wrote in his autobiography. “If we went on vacation, it was to Wisconsin.”

Mr. Newhart graduated from Loyola University, where he focused his studies on business management and accounting, and then tried law school but found it wasn’t a good fit for him. (“I hate the phrase ‘flunked out,’” he wrote. “I failed to complete the assigned courses.”) He served two years stateside in the Army during the Korean War.

Mr. Newhart was an accountant before he broke into comedy, but, as he explained to PBS in 2002: “I was never a certified public accountant. I just had a degree in accounting. The reason I was never a certified public accountant was because it would require passing a test, which I would not have been able to do.”

He did, however, hold several jobs in the Chicago area that required him to do accounting work, and he often told of his habit of balancing the petty cash drawer at the end of the day by making up shortfalls out of his own wallet or pocketing any overage. It was while working in one such job, at the Glidden Company, that he and a friend in another department, Ed Gallagher, began relieving the monotony by calling each other and improvising comic dialogues.

In 1956, they tried recording some of these routines and marketing them to radio stations, but their client base was never very large, and the unprofitable venture ended when Mr. Gallagher took a job in New York.

Mr. Newhart, though, kept writing solo routines, many of them using a telephone as a partner: The audience would imagine the half of the conversation it wasn’t hearing. One memorable bit depicted a press agent talking by phone to Abraham Lincoln about the Gettysburg Address: “You what? You typed it! Abe, how many times have we told you — on the backs of envelopes. I understand it’s harder to read that way, but it looks like you wrote it on the train coming down.”

His material caught the ear of Dan Sorkin, a Chicago radio personality, who played some of Mr. Newhart’s routines on the air, which led to work on a local morning television show opposite “Today” and “Captain Kangaroo.”

“Given the competition and lack of viewer response, we weren’t sure the signal was even getting out of the building,” Mr. Newhart recalled.

But Mr. Sorkin had given some of the tapes that Mr. Newhart and Mr. Gallagher made to George Avakian, an executive at Warner Bros. Records, who liked them. In 1959, Mr. Avakian asked Mr. Newhart to let him know when his next nightclub appearance was so that the company could record the performance. Mr. Newhart, though, had never performed in front of an audience. A hastily recruited agent eventually booked him into the Tidelands Motor Inn in Houston, where, on Feb. 10, 1960, “The Button-Down Mind” was recorded.

“I came off and walked by the maître d’s table,” Mr. Newhart told The Houston Chronicle in an interview for the 50th anniversary of that recording. “He said: ‘Go back out. They’re still applauding.’ And I said, ‘But that’s all I have.’ He said, ‘Well, go back out.’ So I walked back out and said, ‘Which one would you like to hear again?’”

Sitcom Successes

The success of the “Button-Down Mind” albums brought all sorts of demands for Mr. Newhart’s dry humor. In April 1961, he made his New York debut at Carnegie Hall. Later that year, he filmed his first movie, the World War II drama “Hell Is for Heroes,” providing comic relief as part of a cast that also included Steve McQueen, Fess Parker, Bobby Darin and James Coburn. And in December 1961, the first “Bob Newhart Show” had its premiere on NBC.

That show lasted only one season, but it won an Emmy and proved that Mr. Newhart’s brand of humor would work on television. He began turning up all over the dial on game shows, talk shows and variety shows, including “The Garry Moore Show,” “The Dean Martin Comedy Hour,” “The Andy Williams Show” and “The Ed Sullivan Show.”

By the time CBS gave him a sitcom in 1972, also called “The Bob Newhart Show,” he was a household name, but there was some concern about the premise. “In the pilot, we were both psychiatrists,” Peter Bonerz, another star of the show, told The New York Times in 2005. “He was the Freudian, and I was the New Age behaviorist.” That didn’t test well, so Mr. Newhart’s character, Dr. Bob Hartley, was turned into a psychologist, and Mr. Bonerz played a dentist on the same office floor.

The cast was perfectly chosen to contrast with Mr. Newhart’s well-established persona. Marcia Wallace was Dr. Hartley’s sassy receptionist, and Suzanne Pleshette was Emily, his blunt, sarcastic wife. In a great era for sitcoms — “All in the Family,” “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” and “Happy Days” were among its contemporaries — the show performed well, especially in the first three of its six seasons. A statue of Mr. Newhart’s character, commissioned by the cable channel TV Land, is on display at the Navy Pier in Chicago, the city where the show was set.

Mr. Newhart returned to the sitcom format in 1982 with “Newhart,” this time playing Dick Loudon, who with his wife, Joanna (Mary Frann), abandons urban life to try innkeeping in Vermont. The show ran for eight seasons on CBS, ending on May 21, 1990, with a finale whose sly surprise became the stuff of television legend.

As chaos envelops the inn, Dick is struck by a golf ball and knocked unconscious. To try to preserve secrecy, a fake ending was conceived in which Dick wakes up in heaven and meets God, who was to be played by either George Burns or George C. Scott. But the actual ending wasn’t set in heaven at all; it was set in the familiar bedroom of the Hartleys from Mr. Newhart’s earlier show. He wakes up next to not Ms. Frann but Ms. Pleshette. The entire second series had been a dream.

“That scene never appeared in a script, because we knew that the tabloids would get ahold of it,” Mr. Newhart recalled in an interview for the Archive of American Television. The secrecy continued right up till filming, which was in front of a live audience.

“We brought Suzie in from two sound stages over; snuck her in,” Mr. Newhart said. The crowd got the joke before a word was spoken. “The audience recognizes the bedroom set, and they start applauding,” he said. “They started applauding even before they saw Suzie or myself.”

The idea for that ending, Mr. Newhart often said, came from his real wife, Virginia (known as Ginnie), the daughter of Bill Quinn, a veteran character actor. Mr. Newhart’s fellow comedian Buddy Hackett introduced them, and they married in 1963. She died in 2023.

Mr. Newhart is survived by their four children, Robert Jr., Timothy, Courtney Albertini and Jennifer Bongiovi; a sister, Ginny Brittain; and 10 grandchildren.

Mr. Newhart returned to the sitcom format twice more, with “Bob” in 1992 and “George and Leo” in 1997, but neither show made much of an impression. Late in his career he had success as a guest star on other people’s series — “Desperate Housewives,” “ER,” “NCIS” — displaying an ability to play dramatic roles as well as comic ones.

Throughout his career, Mr. Newhart also found time for movies. Among his best-known film characters were Major Major in “Catch-22” in 1970, President Manfred Link in “First Family” in 1980 and the adoptive father of Will Ferrell’s oversize title character in the hit 2003 comedy “Elf.”

He was also in the 1971 film “Cold Turkey,” written and directed by Norman Lear, about a town that tries to quit smoking collectively. That plot had real-life resonance for him in 1985, when he sought treatment for a chronic nosebleed and his doctors diagnosed secondary polycythemia, an excess of red blood cells that can be caused by too much nicotine in the blood. He quit smoking.

Mr. Newhart never really retired, from either acting or stand-up. He explained why to an AARP convention in Boston in 2007, invoking a classic 1950 film: “I call the alternative ‘Sunset Boulevard’ — sitting in a darkened room and having Erich von Stroheim come in and ask me what episode of ‘Newhart’ I would like to see today. That isn’t the way I’d like to spend the rest of my time.”

William Lamb contributed reporting.