Bob Newhart

Background

On September 5, 1929, Bob Newhart was born at West Suburban Hospital in Oak Park, Illinois. His parents, Julia Pauline Newhart, a housewife, and George David Newhart, a part-owner of a plumbing and heating supply company, are of Irish descent, with some German ancestry in his father. His grandmother was originally from St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada. Newhart was educated in the Chicago area at Roman Catholic schools, including St. Catherine of Siena Grammar School in Oak Park, and graduated from St. Ignatius College Prep (high school) in 1947.

Newhart began acting in The Bob Newhart Show in the 1970s as Chicago psychologist Robert Hartley and then in the 1980s as Vermont innkeeper Dick Loudon. In the 1990s, he worked on the short-lived sitcom Bob and George and Leo. In the Disney animated films The Rescuers and The Rescuers Down Under, he voiced Bernard. In 2004, he portrayed library director Judson in The Librarian, a role he reprised in 2014 on the TV series The Librarians. The first of his six guest performances on The Big Bang Theory as Professor Proton earned Newhart his first Primetime Emmy Award on September 15, 2013, and he was awarded five more.

Buddy Hackett first introduced Newhart to Virginia “Ginnie” Quinn, the daughter of character actor Bill Quinn. They tied the knot on January 12, 1963. They have four children: Robert, Timothy, Jennifer, and Courtney, and ten grandchildren. They are Roman Catholics who have raised their children to be so. He is in the Catholic Motion Picture Guild and the Church of the Good Shepherd in Beverly Hills, California. After years of heavy smoking, Newhart was hospitalized in 1985 with secondary polycythemia. He recovered after a few weeks and has since stopped smoking. In 1995, Newhart invested in Rotijefco (a combination of his children’s names), which purchased the Santa Barbara, California radio station KKSB. The format was altered to adult standards, and its call letters were changed to KZBN (his initials). Rotijefco sold the station to Santa Barbara Broadcasting in 2005, and that company changed the station’s call letters to KZSB and its format to news and talk radio.