Susan Saint James, who has died aged 80, was an Emmy-winning American actress with a kooky air who made her name on television, charming viewers in twin title roles: first as Rock Hudson’s younger wife Sally in the lightly comic crime series McMillan & Wife (1971-76), then as free-spirited travel agent Kate McArdle on the sitcom Kate & Allie (1984-89).
She struck big with her very first role. In the NBC TV movie Fame is the Name of the Game (1966), Saint James played Peggy Chan, an editorial assistant who served as girl Friday to star Tony Franciosa’s investigative reporter. The drama proved such a ratings winner that it inspired a spin-off series, The Name of the Game (1968-71), where Peggy (now renamed Maxwell) worked as a go-between for the series’ three male leads Franciosa, Gene Barry and Robert Stack.
The spin-off was notable as the most expensive series then produced for American television; its creative roster included the emergent prodigy Steven Spielberg and screenwriter Steven Bochco. For Saint James, it was an ideal launchpad: she won the Emmy for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Drama Series in 1969, the same year she began dating another small-screen graduate, Clint Eastwood.
Saint James made sporadic guest appearances – on NBC’s Ironside (in 1967) and McCloud (in 1970), on the pilot for ABC’s Alias Smith and Jones (1972) – before her next major TV part, as the plucky, intuitive Sally McMillan on McMillan & Wife, an often gaudily dressed procedural that saw Hudson assume the role of San Francisco’s police commissioner.
The leads’ affectionate chemistry was the major draw of a show that eventually earned Saint James three Emmy and three Golden Globes nominations. So foundational was the actress to the series that her eventual departure, following a contract dispute after the fifth season, necessitated a creative rethink: the show’s final run, with Hudson but without Saint James, brooded under the morose new title McMillan.
Briefly, Saint James flirted with the cinema – and her leading men. She struck sparks with Peter Fonda in the enjoyable musical drama Outlaw Blues (1977) and enjoyed a major commercial hit with the George Hamilton spoof Love at First Bite (1979), going blonde as the fashion model who wins Dracula’s heart; less successful was the same producers’ heist comedy How to Beat the High Cost of Living (1980), pairing Saint James with Jessica Lange and Jane Curtin.
TV remained loyal – and besotted – throughout. Saint James’ war correspondent Aggie O’Shea turned heads on a 1980 episode of M*A*S*H; while hosting Saturday Night Live in October 1981, she met producer Dick Ebersol, who became her third husband after a whirlwind romance.
Kate & Allie, in which Saint James and Curtin played divorced mothers cohabiting in New York, started less than promisingly: Saint James described the pilot, shot under the original title “Two Mommies”, as “ghastly”. Yet the show debuted at #4 on the weekly Nielsen ratings list and lodged in America’s top 20 shows for four seasons; its alternative parenting model and liberal political slant made the series a good fit with the Channel 4 schedules here.
Primetime success elevated Saint James to a whole new level of stardom: in 1986, she served as a celebrity commentator for Wrestlemania II. But it also came with a heightened work rate and a degree of stress that left her with long-term kidney stone issues. It was only slightly surprising, then, when the 53-year-old announced her retirement from acting once Kate & Allie ended its run in 1989.
She had been born Susan Jane Miller in Los Angeles on August 14, 1946, one of four children to Charles Miller, an executive with the Mitchell Camera company, and his wife Constance (née Geiger), a teacher. The family relocated to Rockford, Illinois after her father was appointed president of the Testor Corporation, which specialised in scale model kits.
There, she attended Woodlands Academy of the Sacred Heart and Connecticut College for Women; she began modelling in her teens and changed her surname aged twenty upon starting to act. That same year, Saint James signed a seven-year contract with Universal’s television division before starting on Fame is the Name of the Game.
Notional retirement freed her up to pursue an impressive range of interests. A longtime volunteer for and champion of the Special Olympics, she also helped found Litchfield, Connecticut’s WZBG Radio in 1991; she returned to school in her fifties, earning certification as a master gardener. In 1998, she founded Seedling and Pip, a company providing gift baskets to new mothers.
In 2004, tragedy struck when a private plane carrying Ebersol and two of the couple’s three sons crashed just after take-off from a Colorado airport; her youngest son, fourteen-year-old Teddy, died at the scene. During a 2006 appearance on The Oprah Winfrey Show, a tearful Saint James revealed she’d since been unable to enter Teddy’s bedroom: “I’ve never touched his clothes… I’ve never been able to move his things.”
She was, however, sporadically tempted back to the medium in which she broke through, guesting as the mother of her real-life niece Christa Miller during 1996’s first season of The Drew Carey Show, a defence lawyer on a 2006 episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit and a toy company CEO on a 2011 episode of Suits. Her final appearances came as a character billed as “Old Woman” in Prime Video’s sci-fi sitcom Upload (2020-22).
She is survived by Ebersol and four children: two of her three sons with Ebersol, and a daughter and a son by her second husband, the make-up artist Tom Lucas. Her first marriage, to the writer-director Richard Neubert, ended in divorce.
Susan Saint James, born August 14, 1946, died October 26, 2026.
