Bob Newhart

George Robert "Bob" Newhart (born September 5, 1929) is an American stand-up comedian and actor. Noted for his deadpan and slightly stammering delivery, Newhart came to prominence in the 1960s when his album of comedic monologues The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart was a worldwide bestseller and reached number one on the Billboard pop album chart—it remains the 20th best-selling comedy album in history. The follow-up album, The Button-Down Mind Strikes Back! was also a massive success, and the two albums held the Billboard number one and number two spots simultaneously.

Newhart later went into acting, starring in two long-running and prize-winning situation comedies, first as psychologist Dr. Robert "Bob" Hartley on the 1970s sitcom The Bob Newhart Show and then as innkeeper Dick Loudon on the 1980s sitcom Newhart. He also had two short-lived sitcoms in the nineties titled Bob and George and Leo. Newhart also appeared in film roles such as Major Major in Catch-22 and Papa Elf in Elf. He provided the voice of Bernard in the Walt Disney animated films The Rescuers and The Rescuers Down Under. In 2004 he played the library head Judson in The Librarian and again in 2006 and 2008. In 2011, Newhart made a cameo in the film Horrible Bosses, and in 2013 he guest starred in two episodes of The Big Bang Theory, for one of which he won his first Primetime Emmy Award on September 15, 2013.

Newhart was born and raised in Austin, Chicago, Illinois. His parents were Julia Pauline (née Burns; 1900–1993), a housewife, and George David Newhart (1900–1985), a part-owner of a plumbing and heating-supply business. His mother was of Irish descent and his father had Irish, German and English ancestry. One of his grandmothers was from St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada. Newhart has three sisters, Virginia, Mary Joan (a nun, who taught at the all-girls Carmel High School in Mundelein, Illinois) and Pauline.

Newhart was educated at Roman Catholic schools in the Chicago area, including St. Catherine of Siena grammar school in Oak Park, and attended St. Ignatius College Prep (high school), graduating in 1947. He then enrolled at Loyola University of Chicago from which he graduated in 1952 with a bachelor's degree in business management.

Newhart was drafted into the U.S. Army and served in the United States during the Korean War as a personnel manager until being discharged in 1954. Newhart briefly attended Loyola University Chicago School of Law but did not complete a degree, in part, he says, because he was asked to behave unethically during an internship.

After the war, Newhart got a job as an accountant for United States Gypsum. He later claimed that his motto, "That's close enough," and his habit of adjusting petty cash imbalances with his own money shows he did not have the temperament to be an accountant. He also claimed to have been a clerk in the unemployment office who made $55 a week, but who quit upon learning weekly unemployment benefits were $45 a week and he "only had to come in to the office one day a week to collect it."