Susan Saint James obituary

Susan Saint James, who has died of pancreatic cancer aged 80, was a major star on US television for two decades, shooting to worldwide fame alongside Rock Hudson in the police drama McMillan & Wife and playing one of two divorced single mums in the female “odd couple” sitcom Kate & Allie.

Saint James was cast as McMillan’s wife, Sally, after being spotted in a 1970 episode of another crime series, McCloud, playing a police officer on the trail of a serial killer. The role of Stewart McMillan, or “Mac”, a debonair San Francisco police commissioner, was Hudson’s first in a TV series after more than two decades as a movie heart-throb in Hollywood’s so-called golden age, alongside sex symbols such as Gina Lollobrigida and Doris Day. The husky-voiced Saint James more than held her own in the show, in which she starred for five years from 1971.

The programme’s winning twist is that the apparently scatter-brained Sally is more shrewd than she appears, and often steps in to help her husband, as well as uncovering new crimes. The couple’s social invitations to dinner parties and charity events invariably lead them to discover robbery or murder, too, while at other times Sally herself is targeted by criminals, kidnapped more than once and, predictably, rescued by her loving husband.

The screen relationship made McMillan & Wife a hit with global audiences – and its demise came when Saint James left after five series following a contractual dispute. Sally was killed off in a plane crash and the programme returned titled simply McMillan, surviving for only one more series.

Saint James switched to comedy for Kate & Allie (1984-89). She played Kate McArdle alongside Jane Curtin as Allie Lowell, two divorcees and former high-school buddies with three children between them who move into a Greenwich Village apartment together to ease their financial and emotional burdens. The two actors had previously played suburban housewives in the 1980 film comedy How to Beat the High Cost of Living and Saint James herself had already gone through two failed marriages.

The producers of the show made clear that there was no sexual relationship – the pair’s separate bedrooms with single beds were highly visible.

“This is not a statement saying, ‘Girls, leave the guys and go live with your best friend,’” said Saint James. “Kate and Allie didn’t plan this. It’s just the best solution they could think of, and their friendship sustains them.”

Like McMillan & Wife, Kate & Allie thrived through the on-screen relationship between the characters, while the sitcom saw the friends go on to start their own catering business as their children grow up.

When it ended, Saint James mostly retired from acting – returning to the screen just a handful of times – to bring up her own children and concentrate on voluntary work with Special Olympics, an organisation providing opportunities for children and adults with learning disabilities. She also co-owned the soft-rock radio station WZBG based in Litchfield, Connecticut, from its launch in 1992 until its sale in 2024.

Born in Los Angeles, she was the daughter of Constance (nee Geiger), a teacher, and Charles Miller, a toolmaker with a newsreel and movie camera manufacturer. The family moved to Rockford, Illinois, when Charles became president of the model kits and hobby products company Testor.

After boarding at a Catholic school, the Woodlands Academy of the Sacred Heart, in Lake Forest, Illinois, Susan had plans to study at Connecticut College, but ditched them when a Life magazine photographer at her brother’s wedding told her she would make a professional model. Moving to New York, she landed a contract with a leading agency.

She then spent 18 months modelling in Paris, where she was also a stagehand at L’Olympia music hall, work that included assisting the French singer-actor Charles Aznavour, who encouraged her to act.

On returning to the US in 1966, she took acting classes, changed her name to Susan Saint James and, aged 19, signed a seven-year contract with Universal Studios.

She walked straight into a part in a TV pilot, Fame Is the Name of the Game (1966), playing Peggy, an editorial assistant, alongside Tony Franciosa as an investigative reporter. It ran as a series titled The Name of the Game (1968-71) and won Saint James a Primetime Emmy award in 1969 (followed by two more nominations). She earned further Emmy nominations for McMillan & Wife and Kate & Allie.

In between those programmes, she acted in run-of-the-mill TV movies while enjoying film roles as Peter Fonda’s girlfriend in Outlaw Blues (1977) and, with her dark hair dyed blond, the love interest of Dracula (George Hamilton) in the hit 1979 vampire spoof Love at First Bite. (“Even industry people didn’t recognise me as the blond model, though I shared top billing,” she said.)

She was also seen as a war correspondent in a 1980 episode of the sitcom M*A*S*H, and had a brief relationship with the musician Stephen Stills of Crosby Stills & Nash.

In later years Saint James occasionally appeared on television in series such as Law & Order: Special Victims Unit (in 2006), Suits (in 2011) and Upload (2020-22).

Her first two marriages, to the scriptwriter Richard Neubert (1967-68) and Tom Lucas, a make-up artist (1971-77), ended in divorce. In 1981, she married Dick Ebersol, a television executive. Their son Teddy died in 2004.

Ebersol and their other sons, Charlie and Willie, survive her, along with Sunshine and Harmony, the children from her second marriage, a sister, Mercedes, and seven grandchildren.