Bob Newhart

Television actor and comedian Bob Newhart was born George Robert Newhart on September 5, 1929, in Oak Park, Illinois. One of four children, Newhart was born to George David Newhart and Julia Pauline Burns. Newhart picked up the name Bob while in high school. The commonly used phrase “Let George do it” prompted Newhart to change his name. Eventually he thought, “Maybe I’ll go by Bob,” and thus the nickname was born.

After high school, Newhart attended Loyola University Chicago and graduated with an undergraduate degree in business management in 1952. Shortly after, he was drafted into the military. Newhart served in the Army from 1952 to 1954, fighting in the Korean War. Upon his return, Newhart worked as an accountant and advertising copy editor in Chicago while also occasionally performing in a local theatrical stock company and writing comedy sketches for the radio.

While working at the ad agency, Newhart and co-worker Ed Gallagher would make extended, random phone calls to each other throughout the workday. They eventually decided to record the phone calls and use them as audition tapes for comedy work. Gallagher began concentrating more on his job at the agency, while Newhart continued doing the phone calls on his own, a bit that would eventually become a staple of his stand-up act. In 1959, a disc jockey in Chicago heard his material and introduced Newhart to the head of talent at Warner Bros. Records, who signed the 30-year-old accountant to a contract based on his recordings.

A huge success, Button-Down Mind was the first comedy album to reach No. 1 on the Billboard chart, even beating out Elvis Presley and the cast album of The Sound of Music. The album earned not only impressive sales but also high praise from critics, and garnered Newhart a Grammy Award for Album of the Year and another for Best New Artist. Newhart released another comedy album the same year, entitled The Button-Down Mind Strikes Back! For his sophomore album, he received another Grammy, this time for Best Comedy Performance – Spoken Word.

It may have been Newhart’s first attempt at leading a television show, but it definitely wasn’t his last. But before he made his re-emergence in television, Newhart made his film debut the same year that his variety show was canceled. He had a supporting role in the film Hell Is for Heroes. He began to prioritize films and television roles over nightclub performances and appeared in a series of films in the late 1960s and ’70s, including Hot Millions (1968), Catch-22 (1970) and Cold Turkey (1971), before he got his second television series.

Newhart took a hiatus from television for four years, then returned with yet another popular sitcom, simply named Newhart (1982-90). With another all-star cast behind him, Newhart’s new lead role got the actor and the series several Emmy nominations. After the show’s conclusion, Newhart came back to television with the series Bob in 1992, but the series only lasted one season. In 2013, he made an appearance on the popular series The Big Bang Theory, for which he surprisingly received his first Emmy for Outstanding Guest Actor in a Comedy Series.