Susan Saint James, the throaty-voiced actress who became a fixture of American living rooms through "McMillan & Wife" in the 1970s and "Kate & Allie" in the 1980s, has died. She was 80.
A representative for the family told People magazine that she died Monday, October 26. She had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. Reports published Tuesday did not mention funeral or memorial plans.
The family's statement was warm and a little funny, which sounds right for her. "She never met a stranger," it said. The statement went on to describe a woman who treated the clerk at the shoe store with the same attention as a fellow board member, and who usually left the clerk knowing her whole life story.
Born Susan Jane Miller in Los Angeles on August 14, 1946, she grew up mostly in Rockford, Illinois, after her father's job moved the family north. She started modeling as a teenager, and some of that work took her to Paris.
At 20 she came back to Los Angeles and signed a seven-year deal with Universal Studios. Her first screen credit was a 1966 TV movie, "Fame Is the Name of the Game," which turned into the series "The Name of the Game" two years later.
She played Peggy Maxwell, a research assistant who worked for all three of the show's rotating leads. Because the leads changed from episode to episode, Peggy was the one constant. The part earned her an Emmy in 1969. Around the same time she popped up in "It Takes a Thief," "Ironside," "McCloud" and "Alias Smith and Jones."
The role people still bring up came in 1971. As Sally McMillan, the sharp and sunny wife of Rock Hudson's San Francisco police commissioner, she helped make "McMillan & Wife" a staple of NBC's mystery lineup for years. Three Emmy nominations followed.
She left before the sixth and last season over a contract dispute. The writers dealt with her exit in the bluntest way available: Sally died in a plane crash.
Features came next. She played opposite Peter Fonda in "Outlaw Blues" in 1977, then co-starred with George Hamilton in the vampire spoof "Love at First Bite" two years later. In 1980 she teamed up with Jessica Lange and Jane Curtin for "How to Beat the High Cost of Living." A year on, "Carbon Copy" put her on screen with a young Denzel Washington, who made his film debut in it.
None of those movies matched what she had done on television.
Television took her back in 1984, and it was Curtin she was paired with again. "Kate & Allie" followed two divorced friends raising their kids under one roof in New York, with Saint James as the loose, free-spirited Kate and Curtin as the buttoned-up Allie. CBS ran it until 1989. It brought Saint James two more Emmy nominations.
Then she stopped. She told the world, more or less, that she was done, and moved to Litchfield, Connecticut, where she put her energy into raising her younger children.
Her second marriage to makeup artist Tom Lucas had given her a daughter, Sunshine, and a son, Harmony. Her love story with Dick Ebersol started in 1981, when she guest-hosted "Saturday Night Live" and he was running the show. They married roughly six weeks later. Three sons followed: Charlie, Willie and Teddy.
On November 28, 2004, the family's private plane crashed while taking off from Colorado in snowy weather. Teddy, 14, died, as did the pilot and a flight attendant. Ebersol and Charlie were badly hurt but survived. Saint James had gotten off at the earlier stop to head to the family's second home.
Her family singled out what she did next as the thing that defined her. Weeks after the crash she wrote Teddy's eulogy in the form of a personal note to every one of the others, her husband included. They said she put everyone else first even then.
The marriage had been through trouble before that. She filed for divorce in March 2002 and the two reconciled within months. She told People at the time that they had gotten a second chance. Ebersol, in his 2022 memoir, praised her as the best partner he ever had.
She never fully disappeared. Guest spots turned up now and then, including as the mother of her real-life niece Christa Miller on "The Drew Carey Show," and later on "Law & Order: Special Victims Unit" and "Suits." In 1999 she acted in a stage production of "The Miracle Worker" in Torrington, Connecticut. Hollywood gave her a Walk of Fame star in 2008.
Away from the screen, she co-founded Seedling and Pip in 1998 with her sister, Mercedes Dewey, and a friend. The Litchfield business sold baby gift baskets built around books. She also spent years supporting the Special Olympics, volunteering and sitting on its board.
She is survived by Ebersol, Sunshine, Harmony, Charlie and Willie, and by seven grandchildren, according to TV Insider. Her first marriage, to Richard Neubert in 1967, ended in divorce.
