Susan Saint James, the Emmy-winning actress who delighted TV viewers with her light-hearted turns on The Name of the Game, McMillan & Wife and Kate & Allie before quitting at the peak of her powers, has died. She was 80.
Saint James died Monday of pancreatic cancer, her family announced.
Survivors include her third husband, Dick Ebersol, the former Saturday Night Live executive producer and head of NBC Sports whom she married in November 1981. The couple soldiered on after losing their youngest child, 14-year-old son Teddy, in a 2004 plane crash.
She was someone who was “generous with her time and energy, which she valued more than money, and instinctively drawn to whoever needed lifting up,” her family said. “She taught her children to pause, be kind and look out for other people.
On the big screen, Saint James went on the run with Peter Fonda in Outlaw Blues (1977); played the lustful target of Dracula in Love at First Bite (1979), starring George Hamilton; executed a heist with fellow suburbanites Jessica Lange and Jane Curtin in How to Beat the High Cost of Living (1980); and portrayed George Segal’s wife in Carbon Copy (1981).
A contract player at Universal, Saint James portrayed the frequently kidnapped editorial assistant Peggy Maxwell for three seasons (1968-71) on the stylish 90-minute NBC drama The Name of the Game. (THR took a look back at the series in 2018).
Peggy worked at Howard Publications for all three of the rotating characters on the “wheel” series — Tony Franciosa as hotshot reporter Jeff Dillon, Gene Barry as kingly publisher Glenn Howard and Robert Stack as FBI agent turned magazine editor Dan Farrell.
Six months after The Name of the Game’s final episode, Saint James was back on another 90-minute wheel series, McMillan & Wife, which began in rotation with Columbo and McCloud as part of the NBC Mystery Movie franchise.
Like Peggy, Saint James’ Sally McMillan also got into trouble and helped solve crimes, here with her husband, San Francisco police commissioner Stewart “Mac” McMillan (Rock Hudson). She appeared on the show for five seasons through 1976, when she left in a contract dispute (Hudson stuck around the final sixth season).
Saint James returned to series television in 1984 by reuniting with Curtin for the CBS sitcom Kate & Allie. On that show, two childhoods friends now divorced — Saint James’ free-spirited Kate McArdle and Curtin’s more by-the-books Allie Lowell — raise their kids (three in all) in a Greenwich Village brownstone they share.
When Kate & Allie was canceled in 1989 after the sixth season — it was nominated three times for the Emmy for outstanding comedy series — Saint James decided to pretty much shut down her acting career.
She told People magazine in 2002 that she was tired of being “one of those people juggling knives and melons and then [saying], ‘Toss me in a razor blade.’”
Saint James received an Emmy in 1969 for her work in the first season of The Name of the Game, then added noms in 1970 and ’71. She also was nominated for McMillan & Wife in 1972, ’73 and ’75 and for Kate & Allie in 1984 and ’85.
One of four kids, Susan Jane Miller was born in Los Angeles on Aug. 14, 1946. She and her family moved in 1958 to Rockford, Illinois, after her father, Charles, was named president of The Testor Corp., maker of tools and accessories for model kits, and the Hobby Industry Association of America. Her mother, Constance, was a schoolteacher.
Saint James attended the Woodlands Academy of the Sacred Heart for high school and lived and modeled in France for about three years.
Inspired by Paula Prentiss, she moved back to California to try acting when she was 20 — she lived at the Hollywood Studio Club — and quickly scored a part alongside Franciosa in the 1966 NBC/Universal TV movie Fame Is the Name of the Game. Directed by Stuart Rosenberg, who would soon helm Cool Hand Luke, it served as the pilot for The Name of the Game.
Created by Jennings Lang, the series sported a budget of $400,000 an episode, the largest of its day (Universal’s Black Tower stood in for Howard Publications headquarters). It was canceled after its third season, during which the temperamental Franciosa was fired.
In 1967, Saint James appeared in a failed pilot for a crime show called Ready and Willing that starred Jack Weston and Joe Flynn and in the George Peppard feature P.J. A year later, she showed up on the pilot episode of ABC’s It Takes a Thief, starring Robert Wagner, leading to a recurring role as the crook/love interest Charlene “Charlie” Brown.
She also made three other films at Universal that were released in 1968: Jigsaw, starring Bradford Dillman; What’s So Bad About Feeling Good?, starring Peppard and Mary Tyler Moore; and the sequel Where Angels Go … Trouble Follows!, starring Rosalind Russell.
When McMillan & Wife, created by Leonard Stern, bowed in September 1971, Saint James had just turned 25 while Hudson was closing in on 46.
In a 1971 interview with Bobbie Wygant, Saint James described Sally McMillan, the daughter of a cop, as “Peggy Maxwell grown up.”
“She’s still just as nutty and just as goofy, but she’s married to Rock Hudson, and they live a very sophisticated life, they have a very nice house,” she continued. “She can’t get anything done, she doesn’t do anything right, she gets him involved in all her terrible happenings. It’s kind of a comedy mystery.”
At the start of the final season, Sally is killed in a plane crash with her and Mac’s never-seen son.
Saint James moved to Connecticut in 1983 to star in Kate & Allie, which taped in New York City. The sitcom, created by Sherry Coben, debuted in March 1984 as a six-episode midseason replacement series but was quickly renewed for a full season in the fall.
She and Curtin went head to head for outstanding lead actress in a comedy series at the Emmys in 1984 and ’85, with the former SNL star winning both times. As The New York Times wrote in 2007, “Jane Curtin’s Allie, the ex-wife of a cheating Connecticut doctor, is truly miserable, and so the better character.”
When the sitcom ended after 122 episodes in March 1989, Saint James was 43 and would soon become pregnant with Teddy.
She didn’t quit acting entirely, appearing on episodes of The Drew Carey Show, Law & Order: SVU, Suits and Upload and onstage in Connecticut in The Miracle Worker, but she focused on being an active volunteer with the Special Olympics and launching a business selling baby-gift baskets.
Saint James, who had dated rocker Stephen Stills in the late ’70s, got together with Ebersol when she was about to host Saturday Night Live in October 1981.
“She comes to New York, we met on a Sunday, I was in love with her by Monday, we were living together in a hotel by Tuesday, and she did the show on Saturday,” Ebersol said in a 2009 interview. “We were married six weeks later.”
After she hosted, Ebersol took her out to dinner that night, and their photograph while kissing soon appeared in The New York Daily News with the headline, “When Dick Ebersol Books a Host, He Doesn’t Fool Around … On Second Thought, He Does.”
When Kate & Allie became a hit, Ebersol left Saturday Night Live in April 1985 to raise the kids.
On Nov. 28, 2004, a private plane carrying Ebersol and he and Saint James’ sons Charlie and Teddy crashed in snow and fog during an attempted takeoff from Montrose Regional Airport in Colorado (the Ebersoles owned a home in nearby Telluride).
Charlie pulled his injured dad through a hole in the middle of the plane, but Teddy was killed — his body was discovered underneath the wreckage 24 hours later — as was the pilot and steward.
Less than three weeks after the crash, Saint James recorded an interview with Tim Russert for the Today show to thank those who had reached out to her and her family.
“If you know anybody that loses somebody, call them on the phone,” she said. “People always say, ‘I know you don’t want to be bothered.’ You can’t be bothered enough. It’s just fantastic, and I just want them to know that.”
Her family on Tuesday called what she did after Teddy’s death her “defining act … she delivered his eulogy as a note to each of her other children and her husband, giving them words to heal. Even in the deepest grief of her life, she put everyone else first.”
In addition to her husband and Charlie, survivors include another son, William, whom she also had with Ebersol; her son and daughter, Harmony and Sunshine, whom she had with her second husband, makeup artist (and manager) Tom Lucas; her sister, Mercedes; a niece, actress Christa Miller (Shrinking); seven grandkids; and her beloved service dog, Lola.
Her first husband was screenwriter Richard Neubert; they were married from 1967-68.
“She never met a stranger,” her family noted. “Every person she met became the most important person in the room at that moment, from a fellow board member to the clerk at the shoe store, who usually walked away knowing her entire life story.”