Profile of Bill Daily on Famous Like Me

Bill Daily is an American comedian and comic actor, and a veteran of many television sitcoms, born in Des Moines, Iowa, August 30, 1928.

Daily was raised by his mother and various other family members after his father died early in Bill's life. In 1939, Daily and his family moved to Chicago, where he spent the rest of his youth. Upon high school graduation, Daily left home to try to carve out a life as a musician, playing bass with countless jazz bands in countless clubs across the Midwest.

After graduating from the Goodman Theatre School, Daily worked for the NBC television station in Chicago, WMAQ, as an announcer and floor manager. He eventually became a staff director. Daily recently recalled for PBS how one day, preparing for a Chicago-area Emmy Award telecast, he asked a young local comedian to come up with a routine about press agents. The bit, "Abe Lincoln vs. Madison Avenue," became an early hit for the performer -- Bob Newhart.

It was in his traveling-musician days that Daily found his true calling: comedy. He began to do stand-up in the same clubs he had once filled with music, and soon had moved up in the comedy ranks to the point where he was playing some of the bigger clubs in the country.

Television executives liked Daily's clean-cut looks and superb comic timing, so by the mid-1960's he earned guest spots on sitcoms like My Mother the Car and Bewitched. Veteran sitcom writer Sidney Sheldon noticed Daily in one of his myriad small roles, and decided that he would be perfect for a character in his new sitcom, I Dream of Jeannie. Looking back, it was the moment that made Daily's career.

The part on Jeannie was that of an U.S. Army test pilot and astronaut named Roger Healey, who would be sidekick and best friend to Larry Hagman's main character, Tony Nelson. It was a dream part for Daily, who made playing Healey look effortless; it was said that Daily never won any awards for his portrayals because he made it look too easy - people thought he was simply playing himself. While Daily enjoyed his work on Jeannie, Hagman decidedly did not. Daily was witness to countless Hagman tantrums on the set, but he and Barbara Eden stood behind Hagman, citing a substance problem and the progressively poorer scripts on Jeannie as the roots of Hagman's fits.

Two years after Jeannie was canceled, in 1972, Daily was back at work in perhaps his signature role, as commercial-airline navigator Howard Borden in The Bob Newhart Show. Borden, who lived across the hall from Newhart's Bob Hartley character, was essentially an extension of the Roger Healey character, but with decidedly more depth. A divorcee, Borden struggled with being there for his son while keeping his flying schedule. The show was an enormous hit, far beyond Jeannie ever was, and Daily was now immortalized in the annals of television history. After six years, the series ended its run, and in 1978 Daily was looking for work again. He would occasionally be a panelist on the 1970s reincarnation of the CBS game show Match Game.

For the two years that followed The Bob Newhart Show, Daily returned to stand-up, but in 1980, after years of making a living as a second banana, Daily was offered his own show. Called Small and Frye, the show featured Daily as a neurotic doctor; it lasted only three months before being canceled. In 1988, Daily tried his hand again at starring roles, this time as another doctor on the sitcom Starting From Scratch. It fared only mildly better than Frye, and was canceled after one season. Ironically, Daily's most notable post-Newhart role was another supporting one, that of Larry the Psychiatrist on the cult favorite Alf.

In his personal life, Daily very much resembled the Roger Healey character. An unabashed swinging bachelor in the 1960's, Daily admits that he continued that lifestyle even after marrying his wife Pat in the late sixties; in 1975, Pat and Bill divorced. Daily has 2 adopted children (a son and a daughter), and married again in the 1970's to Vivian, with whom he lives today in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Though retired, he still does some comedy and the occasional TV guest appearance, in addition to directing at a local children's theatre.

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