Susan Saint James, the husky-voiced, Emmy-winning actress who starred in McMillan & Wife and Kate & Allie, died on Monday, October 26, 2026, after being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. She was 80. A representative confirmed her death to People.
Her family said she was “generous with her time and energy, which she valued more than money, and instinctively drawn to whoever needed lifting up. She never met a stranger.”
From The Name of the Game to McMillan
She was born Susan Jane Miller in Los Angeles on August 14, 1946, and grew up in Rockford, Illinois, where she began modelling as a teenager. After the 1966 TV movie Fame Is the Name of the Game became the NBC series The Name of the Game, she joined it as the research assistant Peggy Maxwell and won the 1969 Emmy for supporting actress in a drama series.
From 1971 to 1976 she played Sally McMillan, the wife of Rock Hudson’s San Francisco police commissioner, in McMillan & Wife. She was nominated for an Emmy in five consecutive years from 1969. Her films included Where Angels Go, Trouble Follows (1968), Outlaw Blues (1977) with Peter Fonda, the vampire comedy Love at First Bite (1979) with George Hamilton, and How to Beat the High Cost of Living (1980).
Kate & Allie
In 1984 she reunited with Jane Curtin in the CBS sitcom Kate & Allie, about two divorced mothers sharing a Greenwich Village home. It ran for six seasons and brought her two more Emmy nominations, for eight in her career. She largely stepped away from acting after it ended in 1989, though she later guest-starred on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit and Suits. She received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2008.
“She was a beautiful mother and sister and auntie and grandma Gigi and friend and wife to her beloved husband, Dick Ebersol,” Jamie Lee Curtis wrote on Instagram.
Family and loss
Saint James met Dick Ebersol, the NBC Sports chief and Saturday Night Live producer, when she hosted the show in 1981, and they married that year. On November 28, 2004, a private plane carrying Ebersol and two of their sons crashed in Montrose, Colorado; their 14-year-old son Teddy was killed. Weeks later she delivered his eulogy, and she went on to spend much of her time supporting parents who had lost children. She was also a longtime advocate for the Special Olympics.
She is survived by her husband, four children, seven grandchildren and her sister, Mary Mercedes Dewey.