Bob Newhart
George Robert Newhart (born September 5, 1929) is an American comedian and actor. He is known for his deadpan and stammering delivery style. Beginning as a stand-up comedian, he transitioned his career to acting in television. He has received numerous accolades, including three Grammy Awards, an Emmy Award, and a Golden Globe Award. He was honored with the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor in 2002.
Bob Newhart
George Robert Newhart
September 5, 1929
Oak Park, Illinois, U.S.
1958–present
4[1]
- Paul Brittain (nephew)[2]
- Bill Quinn (father-in-law)
1952–1954
Newhart came to prominence in 1960 when his record album of comedic monologues, The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart, became a bestseller and reached number one on the Billboard pop album chart; it remains the 20th-best-selling comedy album in history.[3] The follow-up album, The Button-Down Mind Strikes Back!, was also a success, and the two albums held the Billboard number one and number two spots simultaneously.[4]
Newhart hosted a short lived NBC variety show entitled The Bob Newhart Show (1961) before starring as Chicago psychologist Robert Hartley on The Bob Newhart Show from 1972 to 1978 and then as Vermont innkeeper Dick Loudon on series Newhart from 1982 to 1990. He also had two short-lived sitcoms in the 1990s, Bob and George and Leo. Newhart acted in films such as Catch-22 (1970), Cold Turkey (1971), In & Out (1997), and Elf (2003). He also voiced Bernard in the Disney animated films The Rescuers (1977) and The Rescuers Down Under (1990). Newhart played Professor Proton on the CBS sitcom The Big Bang Theory from 2013 to 2018, for which he received his first Primetime Emmy Award.[5]
Early life and education[edit]
Newhart was born on September 5, 1929, at West Suburban Hospital in Oak Park, Illinois.[6] His parents were Julia Pauline (née Burns; 1901–1994), a housewife, and George David Newhart (1899–1987), a part-owner of a plumbing and heating-supply business. His mother was of Irish descent, whilst his father was of mixed German and Irish descent.[4][7] The family name Newhart is of German origins (Neuhart).[8] One of his grandmothers was from St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada.[9]
He had three sisters, namely Sr. Joan Michael (1927–2018), BVM, Pauline Newhart Quan (1935–2020) and Virginia Newhart Brittain (born 1937).
Newhart was educated at Roman Catholic schools in the Chicago area, including St. Catherine of Siena Grammar School in Oak Park, and attended St. Ignatius College Prep (high school), graduating in 1947. He then enrolled at Loyola University Chicago from which he graduated in 1952 with a bachelor's degree in business management. Newhart was drafted into the United States Army and served in the United States during the Korean War as a personnel manager until being discharged in 1954. He briefly attended Loyola University Chicago School of Law, but did not complete a degree, in part, he says, because he was asked to behave unethically during an internship.[4]
Comedic style[edit]
Newhart is known for his deadpan delivery and a slight stammer that he incorporated early on into the persona around which he built a successful career.[4] On his TV shows, although he got his share of funny lines, he worked often in the Jack Benny tradition of being the "straight man" while the sometimes rather bizarre cast members surrounding him got the laughs. But Newhart has said, "I was not influenced by Jack Benny", and cites George Gobel and Bob and Ray as his initial writing and performance inspirations.[11]
Several of his routines involve hearing half of a conversation as he speaks to someone on the phone. In a bit called "King Kong", a rookie security guard at the Empire State Building seeks guidance as to how to deal with an ape that is "between 18 and 19 stories high, depending on whether there's a 13th floor or not." He assures his boss he has looked in the guards' manual "under 'ape' and 'ape's toes'." Other famous routines include "The Driving Instructor", "The Mrs. Grace L. Ferguson Airline (and Storm Door Company)", "Introducing Tobacco to Civilization", "Abe Lincoln vs. Madison Avenue", "Defusing a Bomb" (in which an uneasy police chief tries to walk a new and nervous patrolman through defusing a live shell discovered on a beach), "The Retirement Party", "Ledge Psychology", "The Krushchev Landing Rehearsal", and "A Friend with a Dog."
In a 2012 podcast interview with Marc Maron, comedian Shelley Berman accused Newhart of plagiarizing his improvisational telephone routine style (although not any actual material of Berman's).[19] But in interviews both years before and after Berman's comments, Newhart has never taken credit for originating the telephone concept, which he has noted was done earlier by Berman and – predating Berman – Nichols and May, George Jessel (in his well-known sketch "Hello Mama"), and in the 1913 recording "Cohen on the Telephone". Starting in the 1940s, Arlene Harris also built a long radio and TV career around her one-sided telephone conversations, and the technique was later also used by Lily Tomlin, Ellen DeGeneres, and others.[20][11]
Bibliography[edit]
On September 20, 2006, Hyperion Books released Newhart's first book I Shouldn't Even Be Doing This. The book is primarily a memoir but also features comic bits. Transcripts of many of Newhart's classic routines are woven into the text. Actor David Hyde Pierce said, "The only difference between Bob Newhart on stage and Bob Newhart offstage is that there is no stage."[25]
Personal life[edit]
Family life[edit]
Buddy Hackett introduced Newhart to Virginia Lillian "Ginnie" Quinn (born December 9, 1940), the daughter of character actor Bill Quinn.[4] They were married on January 12, 1963. The couple had four children, sons Robert (born 1965) and Timothy (born 1967) and daughters Jennifer (born 1973) and Courtney (born 1979), as well as ten grandchildren.[1] Both Roman Catholic, they raised their children in the same faith.[29] He is a member of the Church of the Good Shepherd and the related Catholic Motion Picture Guild[30] in Beverly Hills, California.[31] Ginnie Newhart died at age 82 on April 23, 2023.[32][33]
The Newhart family was close friends with the Rickles family. The couples and their families often vacationed together.[34] Don Rickles and Newhart appeared together on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno on January 24, 2005, the Monday following Johnny Carson's death, reminiscing about their many guest appearances on Carson's show. The two also appeared together on the television sitcom Newhart and for previous episodes of The Tonight Show, where Newhart or Rickles were guest hosts. The friendship was memorialized in Bob & Don: A Love Story – a 2023 short documentary film by Judd Apatow featuring interviews with and home movies of both families.[35]
Health[edit]
In 1985, Newhart was hospitalized for secondary polycythemia, a condition attributed to his years of heavy smoking. He recovered after several weeks and has since quit smoking.[4]
Interests and investment[edit]
In 1995, Newhart was one of several investors in Rotijefco (a blend of his children's names), which bought radio station KKSB (AM 1290 kHz) in Santa Barbara, California. Its format was changed to adult standards and its call sign to KZBN (his initials).[36] In 2005, Rotijefco sold the station to Santa Barbara Broadcasting, which changed its call sign to KZSB and format to news and talk radio.[37][38]
Newhart was an early home-computer hobbyist, purchasing the Commodore PET after its 1977 introduction. In 2001, he wrote "Later, I moved up to the 64 KB model and thought that was silly because it was more memory than I would ever possibly need."[39]
Home[edit]
For over 25 years, Newhart's family lived in a Wallace Neff-designed French Country-style mansion in Bel Air. The 9,169-square-foot, five-bedroom home featured formal gardens, a lagoon-style pool with waterfall, and guest apartment. Newhart sold the property to developers in May 2016 for $14.5 million.[40][41][42] The new property owners razed the mansion and sold the empty 1.37-acre lot for $17.65 million in 2017.[43][44]