Suzanne Pleshette died this past week, at the age of seventy, after a long bout with cancer. The husky-voiced Brooklyn-born actress, who James Wolcott once likened to "a beautiful black swan", made her stage debut in 1957 in Ira Levin's Compulsion and would go on to successfully replace Anne Bancroft in the original Broadway production of The Miracle Worker. She made her film debut in 1958 in Jerry Lewis's The Geisha Boy , and would go on to give affecting supporting performances in Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds, Nevada Smith with Steve McQueen, If It's Tuesday, This Must Be Belgium, and the minor camp classic Youngblood Hawke, in which, as the editor of the title character, the great novelist (author of Alms for Oblivion) played by James Franciscus, she got to adjust her eyeglasses while staring at his manly form and ask, "Should I call you Youngy or Bloody?"
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