The husky-voiced star who cracked cases beside Rock Hudson and later shared a Greenwich Village brownstone with Jane Curtin walked away from series television to raise her children in small-town Connecticut.
Susan Saint James, the Emmy-winning actress of “The Name of the Game,” “McMillan & Wife” and “Kate & Allie,” died Monday, Oct. 26, 2026, of pancreatic cancer. She was 80. A representative confirmed her death.
In a statement, her family said she prized her time and energy above money, steered both toward anyone who needed a lift, and raised her children to slow down and look after other people. “She never met a stranger,” the family said.
The Assistant Who Kept Getting Kidnapped
Born Susan Jane Miller in Los Angeles on Aug. 14, 1946, she grew up in Rockford, Ill., where the family landed in 1958 after her father, Charles, was named president of The Testor Corp. and the Hobby Industry Association of America. Her mother, Constance, taught school. She modeled as a teenager in Paris, and at 20 she moved back to Los Angeles and signed a seven-year contract with Universal Studios.
Her television debut came in the 1966 movie “Fame Is the Name of the Game,” opposite Tony Franciosa. When it spun off into the 90-minute NBC drama “The Name of the Game,” which ran from 1968 to 1971, Saint James became the show’s connective tissue as Peggy Maxwell, an editorial assistant with a habit of being kidnapped who worked for all three rotating leads: Franciosa’s reporter Jeff Dillon, Gene Barry’s publisher Glenn Howard and Robert Stack’s editor Dan Farrell. She won the 1969 Emmy for supporting actress in a drama series and was nominated again in 1970 and 1971 — the start of eight Emmy nominations.
In 1971 she moved onto another NBC wheel series, “McMillan & Wife,” which alternated with “Columbo” and “McCloud” in the NBC Mystery Movie franchise. As Sally McMillan, she helped her husband, Hudson’s San Francisco police commissioner, untangle cases, and she drew three more Emmy nominations. She left after five seasons in a contract dispute; her character was killed off in a plane crash, the “& Wife” was stripped from the title, and the series ended with a finale on April 24, 1977.
The Hosting Gig That Changed Everything
Features followed: a run from the law with Peter Fonda in “Outlaw Blues” (1977), Dracula’s quarry opposite George Hamilton in “Love at First Bite” (1979), a suburban heist with Jessica Lange and Curtin in “How to Beat the High Cost of Living” (1980), and George Segal’s wife in “Carbon Copy” (1981), the film that introduced Denzel Washington.
Guest-hosting “Saturday Night Live” in 1981 changed the rest of her life. She met the show’s executive producer, Dick Ebersol, the future chairman of NBC Sports, and they married barely six weeks later. The marriage lasted 45 years and produced three sons, Charlie, Willie and Teddy; she also had a daughter, Sunshine, and a son, Harmony, from her marriage to makeup artist Tom Lucas. She filed for divorce in 2002 and reconciled with Ebersol later that year. He called her “the greatest partner I’ve ever had by far” in his 2022 memoir.
A Brownstone Split With Jane Curtin
Sherry Coben’s “Kate & Allie” premiered on CBS on March 19, 1984, pairing Saint James’ free-spirited Kate McArdle with Curtin’s straight-laced Allie Lowell — divorced childhood friends raising three children in a shared Greenwich Village brownstone. The sitcom ran six seasons before its 1989 cancellation, earned three nominations for outstanding comedy series and brought Saint James lead actress nominations in 1984 and 1985; Curtin was nominated three times and won twice. The odd-couple formula would echo decades later in “Grace and Frankie.”
Then she stopped. Saint James largely retired from acting after the series ended, settling into Litchfield, Conn., to raise her children, with occasional returns — “The Drew Carey Show,” where she played the mother of her look-alike niece, Christa Miller, plus “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit” and USA Network’s “Suits.”
The Eulogy She Wrote as Notes
On Nov. 28, 2004, after the family spent Thanksgiving in Los Angeles, their private plane landed in Colorado so Saint James could get off at the family’s second home. It crashed on takeoff for Indiana in snowy weather at Montrose, Colo., killing her youngest son, 14-year-old Edward “Teddy” Ebersol, along with the pilot and a flight attendant. Ebersol and their son Charlie survived with serious injuries.
Her family called her response the defining act of her life: weeks after Teddy’s death, she delivered his eulogy as a note written to each of her other children and to her husband, and days after the crash she sat with NBC News anchor Tim Russert to thank the people who had reached out and to tell them the family was all right.
Saint James volunteered for Special Olympics for years and served on its board of directors, and she received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in June 2008. She is survived by Ebersol, four children and seven grandchildren.