Comedy Legend Bob Newhart Dead at 94

Award-winning actor and comedian Bob Newhart died at his Bel-Air home today (July 18) at the age of 94. In recent years, Newhart won new fans with his recurring appearances on Young Sheldon and The Big Bang Theory (for which he won his first Emmy), but his TV career stretches back decades. Newhart starred in 142 episodes of The Bob Newhart Show and eight years of Newhart . In 2003 he starred as Will Ferrell’s dad in the Christmas classic Elf .

Sixty-five years ago, Newhart made the transition from mild-mannered Chicago accountant to mild-mannered comedy legend when he recorded his first album, the best-selling The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart . The comic swept the Grammys that year taking home Best New Artist, Comedy/Spoken Word and Album of the Year.

“One of the first things you learn when you walk out on a nightclub floor for the first time is you can't show fear,” Newhart told NPR’s Alex Chadwick in 2005 . “If you show fear, you're dead meat. So there was a lot of bravado in the first three or four, five years of my career that I didn't want people to catch on to me, you know, how I really didn't know what I was doing.”

Newhart was soon booked at nightclubs around the country performing the quiet absurd deadpan routines that appeared on his follow up records The Button-Down Mind Strikes Back! , Behind The Button-Down Mind Of Bob Newhart , and The Button-Down Mind On TV . He followed with television appearances joining a hypnotist, Playboy founder Hugh Hefner and F-Troop ’s Larry Storch on the short-lived Playboy’s Penthouse , an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents , and alongside Steve McQueen and an all-star cast in the war picture Hell is For Heroes .

In addition to the Grammys and Emmy, Newhart was inducted into the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences Hall of Fame and was presented Mark Twain Prize for Humor at the Kennedy Center, in 2002. His book, I Shouldn’t Even Be Doing This, was published in 2006 and he kept performing a couple dozen live shows a year as he pushed 80. “I could never imagine not doing stand-up.,” he told NPR. “Why would you say, ‘I don't want to make people laugh anymore. I'm tired of that'?”

The Hollywood Chamber of Commerce will place flowers on the funnyman's star on Hollywood Boulevard near Cahuenga this afternoon.