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Bob Newhart, the deadpan accountant-turned-comedian who became one of the most popular TV stars of his time after striking gold with a classic comedy album, has died at 94.
Newhart's publicist said the actor died on Thursday, local time, in Los Angeles after a series of short illnesses.
Best remembered now as the star of two hit television shows of the 1970s and 1980s that bore his name, Newhart launched his career as a stand-up comic in the late 1950s.
"When I first started out in stand-up, I just remember the sound of laughter," he once said.
"It's one of the great sounds of the world."
Newhart first played a psychologist on The Bob Newhart Show from 1972 to 1978, and then portraying a Vermont innkeeper on Newhart from 1982 through 1990.
In both shows he relied on a bland, cardigan-clad everyman character who is confounded by the oddball people around him.
His 1960 live album, The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart, became the first comedy album to top the charts and earned him three Grammy awards.
Newhart was nominated for Emmy Awards nine times, beginning in 1962 for writing on his short-lived variety show, but did not win until 2013 when he was given the award for a guest appearance on The Big Bang Theory.
He ended his Newhart show in 1990 with an episode widely regarded as one of the best in US television; in the last scene of the series he awakens in bed with his wife from the first series after "dreaming" his life in the second series.
Newhart sprang from an era of angry, edgy stand-up comics such as Lenny Bruce, Shelley Berman and Mort Sahl, but his act was subtly subversive, without the profanity or shock used by his contemporaries.
He exploited his hesitant, bashful ordinariness to skewer society in his own fashion — including sketches about how a publicity agent would "handle" Abraham Lincoln or one featuring an inept official on the phone with a frantic man trying to defuse a bomb.
Newhart vowed in 2003 that he would work as long as he could.
"It's been so much, 43 years of my life; (to quit) would be like something was missing," he said.
Over the years, Newhart also appeared in several movies, usually in comedic roles such as Catch 22, In and Out, and Legally Blonde 2.
He guest-starred in Elf, as the diminutive dad of adopted full-size son Will Ferrell.
More recent work included Horrible Bosses and the TV series The Librarians, The Big Bang Theory and Young Sheldon.
In 2002, he was awarded the Kennedy Center's Mark Twain Prize for American Humor.
Asked by the New York Times in 2019 whether he felt 90 years old, Newhart said: "My mind doesn't. I can't turn it off."
Newhart was introduced by comedian Buddy Hackett to his future wife, Virginia, whom he married in 1964.
The Newharts had four children and Virginia Newhart died in 2023.
AP/Reuters