Trivia: A Chicagoan from head to toe, American comedian Bob Newhart started his workaday life as a certified public accountant after flunking out of law school. As a means of breaking his job's monotony, Newhart would call his friend Ed Gallagher, and improvise low-key comedy sketches. A mutual friend of Newhart and Gallagher's, Chicago deejay Dan Sorkin, tape-recorded some of these off-the-cuff routines and played them for Warner Bros. records. Newhart suddenly found himself booked into a Houston nightclub -- his first-ever public appearance. Armed with telephone-conversation routines which delineated how Abe Lincoln would be handled by a publicity agent, or how Abner Doubleday would have fared trying to sell baseball to a modern-day novelty firm, Newhart recorded his first comedy album in 1960 -- which evidently struck a nerve with fellow white-collar workers, since it sold 1,500,000 copies. The hottest young comic on the club-and-TV circuit, Newhart was offered starring roles in situation comedies, but felt he wasn't a good enough actor to make a single character interesting week after week. Instead, he signed in 1961 for NBC's The Bob Newhart Show, a comedy-variety series which nosedived in the ratings but won an Emmy. Fearing that TV would eat up all his material within a year or so, Newhart went back to nightclubs after his one-season series was cancelled. Sharpening his acting skills in TV guest spots and in several films (his first, 1962's Hell is For Heroes, was so unnerving an experience that Bob repeatedly begged the producers to kill his character off before the fadeout), Newhart felt emboldened enough to attempt a regular TV series again in 1972. This Bob Newhart Show cast the comedian as psychologist Bob Hartley - an ideal outlet for his "button-down" style of dry humor. Six seasons and several awards later, Newhart was firmly established as a television superstar; this time around he wasn't cancelled, but ended the series on his own volition, feeling the series had exhausted its bag of tricks. Most popular sitcom personalities had come acropper trying to repeat their first success with a second series, but Newhart broke the jinx with Newhart in 1982, wherein Bob played author Dick Loudon, who on a whim decided to open a New England colonial inn. Newhart was every bit as popular as his earlier sitcom, and, like the previous show, the series ended (in 1990) principally because Newhart chose to end it. This he did with panache: Newhart's final scene suggested the entire series had been a bad dream experienced by Bob Newhart Show's Bob Hartley! A third starring sitcom, 1992's Bob, found Newhart playing a cult-figure comic book artist; alas, despite excellent scriptwork and the usual polished Newhart performance, this new series fell victim to format tinkering and poor timeslots. Over teh course of the next few decades, Newhart would frequently turn up in guest roles on shows like Murphy Brown, ER, and Desperate Housewives, and though his 1997 odd couple sitcom George & Leo failed to find its footing, he did appear in all three installments of TNT's popular fantasy trilogy The Librarian, starring Noah Wyle. Meanwhile, cameos in such films as Elf and Horrible Bosses continually offered a gentle reminder that comedy's nicest funnyman could still crack us up.

Trivia: Actress Mary Frann (born Mary Frances Luecke), is best remembered for playing the skeptical but loyal wife of Bob Newhart in Newhart (1982-1990). Between 1974 and 1979, Frann was a regular on the soap opera Days of Our Lives and also was a co-star on the short-lived nighttime soap King's Crossing (1982). Since the demise of Newhart, Frann appeared regularly in made-for-television movies, as a guest star in series, and in miniseries.A native of St. Louis, MO, Frann started out as a child model and in high school appeared in local television commercials. After high school she studied drama at Northwestern University. She supported herself working as a weather person on a St. Louis NBC affiliate. Following graduation she was hired to host a Chicago morning television show. As an actress, Frann debuted on the ABC series My Friend Tony. When not acting, Frann was involved in various charitable organizations. The night before she passed away from undisclosed causes, she had been working on a volunteer committee with the Los Angeles Mission on a project to help homeless women.

Trivia: Landed earliest acting gigs on a few soap operas during the 1970s, including Gerry Brayley on CBS's daytime sudser Love of Life, Penny Davis on the NBC serial The Doctors and Karen Wolek on the ABC soap One Life to Live. Made her Broadway debut in 1978's acclaimed revival of Once in a Lifetime. Breakout role was as Stephanie Vanderkellen, a former rich girl-turned-maid, in the popular sitcom Newhart, which she joined in its sophomore season. Joined the cast of the Designing Women as Allison Sugarbaker, the cousin of Julia and Suzanne, in the sixth season. Played the wife of Peter Scolari in two shows; first on Newhart, then later on the Jason Alexander sitcom Listen Up!

Trivia: A vaudeville and burlesque comedienne who went on to essay numerous film roles after being discovered at an orphanage at the age of eight, actress Billie Bird would later use her stage experience to entertain troops on 12 USO tours in the 1960s and '70s. Born Bird Berniece Sellen in Pocatello, ID, in February 1908, her chance discovery came when a traveling road show stopped to entertain the children at the orphanage in which she resided and immediately recognized her talent. Subsequently traveling with the troupe and studying with a tutor in her downtime, Bird went on to form a sister act and later appeared in such "light opera" works as Show Boat and New Moon. A move to Los Angeles in 1943 found Bird performing at such hot spots as Club Moderne and The Colony Club, and, from 1947 to 1955, she showed off her skills on the guitar, clarinet, vibraphone, and bagpipes in burlesque shows. Although Bird made her screen debut in the 1921 comedy Grass Widowers, it was the 1950s that found her edging away from the stage and toward television and film. Particularly active in movies in the '50s, Bird appeared in more than a dozen films, including Somebody Loves Me (1952) and The Joker Is Wild (1957). The actress remained relatively active in the '60s, as well, although her career slowed to a notable pace in the '70s with the exception of a featured role in the popular late-'70s sitcom Benson. However, her screen career later picked up momentum with such notable '80s comedies as Sixteen Candles (1984), One Crazy Summer (1986), and Police Academy 4: Citizens on Patrol (1987), and Bird made a successful return to the world of sitcom television as an aged, but feisty, support-group member in Dear John. Roles in such films as Home Alone (1990) and Dennis the Menace (1993) followed. In 1995, she made her final screen appearance in the Pauly Shore comedy Jury Duty. Stricken with Alzheimer's disease in the '90s, Bird died in November 2002. She was 92.