Susan Saint James, the Emmy award-winning actress known for her roles in the television sitcoms “Kate & Allie” and “McMillan & Wife,” died on Monday in Los Angeles. She was 80.
Her death, in a hospital, was confirmed by a family representative, Whitney Tancred, who said Ms. Saint James received a pancreatic cancer diagnosis this year.
In “Kate & Allie,” Ms. Saint James starred as Kate McArdle opposite Jane Curtin’s Allie Lowell. The comedy centered on two divorced mothers who share an apartment in New York City with the three children between them and “find themselves tackling the problems of single parenthood together,” as a review in The New York Times described it.
A publicist at the time said Ms. Saint James’s character was “a free spirit caught up in the radical movement” of the 1960s, while Allie was a “traditionalist.” It ran for 122 episodes on CBS, from 1984 to 1989.
Ms. Saint James was twice nominated for an Emmy for best lead actress for the role, and three times for her role in the 1970s sitcom “McMillan & Wife,” in which she played Sally McMillan, the spouse of Stuart McMillan, a police commander played by Rock Hudson.
In 1969, she won an Emmy for her supporting role in the NBC series “The Name of the Game” as a research assistant at a large magazine publishing company. She was nominated for the same role in each of the following two years, among eight Emmy nominations she received in her career, with one win.
Susan Jane Miller was born in Los Angeles on Aug. 14, 1946, and was raised in Rockford, Ill. Her mother, Constance (Geiger) Miller, was a teacher, and her father, Charles Daniel Miller, was president of the Testor Corporation, a manufacturer of paints, glues and other accessories for scale model kits.
Her parents, she told People magazine in 1977, gave her a “solid base as a child” that allowed her “to be somewhat freaky as an adult.” She attended Catholic school, where she recalled she was “the most holy and always in church.”
“I’m sure the ‘Saint’ in my name comes from my Virgin Mary complex,” she said.
She told People that she had dreamed of becoming an actress since she was 7 years old. When she was 20, she changed her last name to Saint James and headed to Hollywood to pursue an acting career, signing with Universal. In 1968, she landed a role on “The Name of the Game,” and was a regular on all three seasons of the show, which starred Tony Franciosa, Gene Barry and Robert Stack.
In 1981, as a guest host on “Saturday Night Live,” she met Dick Ebersol, who was the executive producer of the show. They were married six weeks later. Mr. Ebersol later became the chairman of NBC Universal Sports.
The family was struck by tragedy on Nov. 28, 2004, just after Thanksgiving. Mr. Ebersol and two of the couple’s sons — Edward, who was known as Teddy, and Charlie — were on a jet traveling from Montrose, Colo., to South Bend, Ind., where Charlie, 21, was attending the University of Notre Dame.
The jet crashed on takeoff, killing Teddy, who was 14, as well as the captain and a crew member. Mr. Ebersol, Charlie and the co-pilot were injured. The cause of the crash was ice buildup on the upper wing.
While her husband listened from a gurney in a Connecticut church, Ms. Saint James addressed him in her eulogy for Teddy.
“It would be a terrible mistake if you, Dick, were to ever entertain any thought such as, ‘I should have been home more or I worked too much and that was bad,’” she said. “Because your passion and creativity and vision and successes and devotion to the details of your work and all the joy that you got from that was the pulse of the house.”
In addition to Mr. Ebersol and her son Charlie, Ms. Saint James is survived by Willie Ebersol, her third child with Mr. Ebersol; a son, Harmony Lucas, and a daughter, Sunshine Lucas, from her marriage to Tom Lucas, which ended in divorce; a sister, Mary Mercedes Dewey, and seven grandchildren.
In an interview with The Times in 2002, Ms. Saint James spoke of her love of a tree house that her family had built in the yard of their Connecticut home.
“It’s great because there’s no phone up there, there’s nobody up there,” she said. “I can just go and sit there and no one can find me.”
Alain Delaquérière contributed research.
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