She cracked cases alongside Rock Hudson and later shared a Greenwich Village brownstone with Jane Curtin on screen, then walked away from series television to raise her children in small-town Connecticut.

Susan Saint James, the Emmy-winning actress known for “The Name of the Game,” “McMillan & Wife” and “Kate & Allie,” died Monday, Oct. 26, 2026, of pancreatic cancer in Los Angeles. She was 80.

Her family said she prized her time and energy above money and steered both toward anyone who needed a lift, and that she raised her children to slow down and look after other people. “She never met a stranger,” the family said in a statement.

Her husband, Dick Ebersol, four children and seven grandchildren survive her.

Jane Curtin, her “Kate & Allie” co-star, said in a statement on Tuesday, Oct. 27: “We lost a decent person today. Susan St. James was a decent person who made Kate and Allie a joy.” She added: “Susan was my friend and working with her brought such laughter, community and family to the stage at the Ed Sullivan Theater. I’ll miss her.”

From Rockford to a Universal Contract

She was born Susan Jane Miller in Los Angeles on Aug. 14, 1946, and grew up in Rockford, Ill., where the family landed in 1958. Her father, Charles, was named president of The Testor Corp., and her mother, Constance, was a schoolteacher.

Saint James modeled as a teenager in Paris. At 20, she moved back to Los Angeles and signed a seven-year contract with Universal Studios.

She made her television debut in the 1966 movie “Fame Is the Name of the Game,” opposite Tony Franciosa, which spun off into the 90-minute NBC drama “The Name of the Game.” The series ran from 1968 to 1971, and she played Peggy Maxwell, a research assistant with a habit of being kidnapped who served as the show’s connective tissue. All three rotating leads employed her: 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 nominations followed in 1970 and 1971, the start of a career total of eight Emmy nominations.

Her early credits also included a recurring role in the crime-caper series “It Takes a Thief,” starring Robert Wagner, and guest spots on “Ironside,” “McCloud” and “Alias Smith and Jones.” She took a supporting role in the 1968 film “Where Angels Go, Trouble Follows.”

The Contract Fight That Ended “Wife”

Saint James moved onto another NBC wheel series in 1971, “McMillan & Wife,” which alternated with “Columbo” and “McCloud” in the NBC Mystery Movie franchise. She played Sally McMillan, who helped her husband — Rock Hudson’s San Francisco police commissioner — untangle cases, and the role brought three more Emmy nominations.

She left after five seasons in a contract dispute. Producers killed off her character in a plane crash and stripped “& Wife” from the title, and Hudson stayed with “McMillan” for the sixth and final season. The series finale aired April 24, 1977.

Her films included “Outlaw Blues” (1977), a run from the law with Peter Fonda; “Love at First Bite” (1979), as Dracula’s quarry opposite George Hamilton; “How to Beat the High Cost of Living” (1980), a suburban heist with Jessica Lange and Curtin; and “Carbon Copy” (1981), in which she played George Segal’s wife in the film that introduced Denzel Washington.

She guest-hosted “Saturday Night Live” in 1981, and that booking reshaped everything that came after. On the show she met its executive producer, Dick Ebersol, the future chairman of NBC Sports, and the two married barely six weeks later. The marriage lasted 45 years.

They had three sons, Charlie, Willie and Teddy. Saint James also had a daughter, Sunshine, and a son, Harmony, from her marriage to makeup artist Tom Lucas.

Why She Stopped Juggling Knives

CBS aired the premiere of Sherry Coben’s “Kate & Allie” on March 19, 1984. The show paired 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 odd-couple formula would echo decades later in “Grace and Frankie.”

The series ran six seasons before its 1989 cancellation and drew three nominations for outstanding comedy series, with lead actress nominations for Saint James in 1984 and 1985. Curtin was nominated three times and won twice.

Saint James largely retired from acting once the series ended and settled into Litchfield, Conn., to raise her children. She told People magazine in 2002 that she had tired of being “one of those people juggling knives and melons and then [saying], ‘Toss me in a razor blade.’”

She returned to the screen occasionally — on “The Drew Carey Show,” as the mother of her look-alike niece, Christa Miller; on “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit”; and on USA Network’s “Suits.” In 1998 she co-founded Seedling and Pip, a baby gift basket business with a focus on books, based in Litchfield, with her sister, Mercedes Dewey, and a friend. She starred in a production of “The Miracle Worker” in Torrington, Conn., in 1999.

Saint James filed for divorce in 2002 and reconciled with Ebersol later that year. “We had a second chance,” she told the magazine, adding: “I’m amazingly happier, so that’s a good sign.” Ebersol, in his 2022 memoir, called her “the greatest partner I’ve ever had by far.”

She received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in June 2008. She volunteered for the Special Olympics for years and served on its board of directors.

After the Crash at Montrose

The family spent Thanksgiving in Los Angeles in 2004, and the private plane carrying them put down in Colorado to let Saint James off at the family’s second home. The plane crashed on takeoff for Indiana in snowy weather at Montrose, Colo., on Nov. 28, 2004, 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.

What she did next was, to her family, the defining act of her life. She sat with NBC News anchor Tim Russert days after the crash, thanking the people who had reached out and telling them the family was all right. Her eulogy for Teddy came weeks after his death, delivered as a note she had written to each of her other children and to her husband.