25th April 2023, Mumbai: Ginnie Newhart, the famous comedian Bob Newhart’s wife who devised the brilliant plan to combine his Vermont-based sitcom with his prior Chicago-based programme to end it, has passed away. She was 82 years old.
After a protracted illness, she passed away on Sunday at their Century City home, publicist Jerry Digney informed The Hollywood Reporter. Recently, she and Bob commemorated their 60th wedding anniversary.
The Bob Newhart Show on CBS featured Bob Newhart as a clinical psychologist for six seasons (1972–1978) alongside Suzanne Pleshette as his wife. For the following eight seasons (1982–1990), Newhart played Vermont innkeeper Dick Loudon, with Mary Frann playing his wife.
Dick wakes up in the middle of the night as Bob Hartley while in bed with Pleshette in their Chicago flat in one of the most appreciated series finales in television history, hinting that his entire second season had been a dream.
During a Christmas party that Pleshette chance to be attending, Ginnie had the idea for the conclusion.
Julia Duffy, who plays Ginnie in the television series Newhart, claimed on Twitter that Ginnie “gave me the best advise in everything from design to birthing and children and yes, men. I adored her.
Virginia Lillian Quinn, one of three daughters, was born on December 9, 1940, in New York.
Her father, the well-known character actor Bill Quinn, began his career in vaudeville. He then portrayed Leonard ‘Bones’ McCoy’s father in Star Trek V: The Final Frontier (1989), Mr. Van Ranseleer, the blind pub patron on Archie Bunker’s Place, and Mary Richards’ father on The Mary Tyler Moore Show. Up to his passing in 1994, he had been married for 54 years to Mary Catherine Roden.
Comedy performer Buddy Hackett arranged for Ginnie and Bob to go on a blind date because Ginnie was watching Hackett’s children at the time.
She remembered in a 2013 interview that “Buddy came back one day and said in his own unique way, ‘I met this young guy and his name is Bobby Newhart, and he’s a comic and he’s Catholic and you’re Catholic and I think maybe you should marry each other’ “
The first time they met, they went to Buddy and his wife’s house and played pool.
She commented, “It was just silly,” in 2005. “I was 20, 21, 21, and Bob was, I believe, 32. And every time someone would put a ball in the pocket or accomplish whatever else is required, [we] would go around the table singing “Bridge on the River Kwai.”
She is survived by her husband as well as their four children—Robert Jr., Timothy, Courtney, and Jennifer—and ten grandkids. (One of their daughters is known by the moniker “Buddy.”)