Just as fruitful as his career, has been his marriage to Ginny Newhart. The two of them have one of the longest marriages in Hollywood, having been together for 59 years.
Born George Robert Newhart in Oak Park, Illinois, on Sept. 5, 1929, Bob Newhart has managed to carve a name for himself in the industry. With over six decades of his career to boast of, the star recently turned 93 years old, according to PEOPLE.
Newhart, a graduate of Loyola University Chicago with a bachelor's degree in business management, was drafted into the U.S. Army, where he served as a personnel manager during the Korean War. He was eventually discharged in 1954.
Soon, he started working as an accountant, but in five years, Warner Bros. Records signed him to a comedy album based on telephone recordings he'd done with a friend of his.
"They said, 'We want to record you at your next nightclub,' " Newhart recalled. "I said, 'We have kind of a problem: I've never played a nightclub.' "
Executives vowed to get him into one, "but that took six months because it was hard to find a place that could take a chance on a guy. I pretended I knew what I was doing, and then the record came out and went crazy, and now I had to learn the art of standup from the top."
"Being onstage took all the bravado I had," he added, "pretending like I knew what I was doing." It's safe to say that pretending to know something really did work in his favor, and he has a successful career to prove it.
Just as fruitful as his career, has been his marriage to Ginny Newhart. The two of them have one of the longest marriages in Hollywood, having been together for 59 years, according to PEOPLE.
"There's something about laughter and the longevity of a marriage," Newhart told Ben Mankiewicz, during an interview with CBS Sunday Morning, in 2020. Newhart wed his wife, Ginny, in 1963. They went on to have four kids and 10 grandkids since.
Newton actually has his pal, Buddy Hackett, to thank for marrying Ginny, he revealed. He was set up on a blind date with Ginny by Hackett, shared Newhart to PEOPLE.
"Well, we're both Catholic. She's three-quarters Irish. I’m three-quarters Irish," Newhart said. "Buddy said, 'I've got a girl for you. She's going with another guy, but I don't think he's right for her, so I'm going to fix you up on a blind date. You'll meet her and you'll date and you'll get married. Then you'll have kids and you'll call one of the kids Buddy.'"
"Which we did — one of our daughters, we called her Buddy,” Newhart joked.
Ginny's father Bill Quinn was an American film actor, who has been there for all of Newhart’s successes over the years, along with the occasional miss, he acknowledged.
“She’d be in the dressing room. She’d say, ‘Something’s wrong with the sound system. I couldn’t hear anything,’ ” he recalls. “I said, ‘Honey, nothing was wrong with the sound system. They didn’t laugh!’ ”
During the interview in 2019, Newhart hinted that he has no plans to retire as a comedian anytime soon, either.
“I get this question a lot: ‘Why do you still do comedy?’ ” he says. “Why would you ever get tired of making people laugh? You never want to give up that sound, that great sound that you fell in love with 60 years ago.”
References:
https://people.com/tv/bob-newhart-life-in-photos/
https://people.com/tv/bob-newhart-laughter-contributes-to-marriage-with-wife-ginny/
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/comedy-legend-bob-newhart/
https://people.com/tv/how-bob-newhart-met-wife-ginnie/
Cover Image Source: Getty Images | Photo by Frederick M. Brown
