Described in a note from his rep as an “accountant-turned-entertainment icon,” Newhart’s mild-mannered persona translated smoothly from the stage to the screen.
Bob Newhart, the comedian whose laidback, deadpan delivery earned him the love of American audiences and the admiration of generations of stand-ups who came after him, has died. He was 94.
The “accountant-turned-entertainment icon,” as the statement from his longtime publicist Jerry Digney characterized him, died after “a series of short illnesses.” Digney hailed his death as the “end of an era in comedy.” From the early 1960s through the late 1980s, Newhart starred on a series of beloved eponymous comedy shows, including the short-lived but celebrated variety series, Newhart’s first comedy album, which became a sensation, selling more than one million copies after it was released in 1960 and vaulting him into the celebrity stratosphere.Newhart played a mild-mannered, gently befuddled everyman onstage, a comedy persona befitting a man who’d previously been a pencil-pusher in Chicago.
“His story is so interesting because he was an accountant and he wrote all these sketches,” filmmaker Judd Apatow told The Daily Beast of Newhart last year. “He had a friend who worked at a radio station, and they let him record the sketches, and he got a record deal out of it. And then he had to perform them in front of an audience, but he’d never performed in front of an audience before!”
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