Inside Bob Newhart and Wife Ginnie's 60-Year Love Story

Bob Newhart and wife Ginnie Newhart's love story spanned 60 years before their deaths, which happened a year apart.

Bob — who died at age 94 on July 18 — first met Ginnie in 1962 when their mutual friend, actor Buddy Hackett, set them up and just one year later, they were married. 

"Buddy said, 'I've got a girl for you,'" Bob told PEOPLE in 2019. "'She's going with another guy, but I don't think he's right for her, so I'm going to fix you up on a blind date. You'll meet her and you'll date and you'll get married. Then you'll have kids and you'll call one of the kids Buddy.' Which we did."

Bob and Ginnie, who died at age 82 in April 2023, had four children together — sons Robert, born in November 1963, and Timothy, born in 1967, and their daughters, Jennifer and Courtney, born in 1971 and 1977 respectively. In November 2020, they revealed to PEOPLE that one of their daughters was nicknamed “Buddy” as a follow-through on their promise to Hackett.

Explaining their initial connection, The Bob Newhart Show alum said they had a lot of similarities regarding their upbringings and backgrounds.  

“Well, we’re both Catholic. She’s three-quarters Irish. I’m three-quarters Irish,” Newhart explained. 

He added that Ginnie was always his biggest supporter from helping him with his shows to encouraging him to step outside the box.

"She'd be in the dressing room. She'd say, 'Something's wrong with the sound system. I couldn’t hear anything,'" he recalled. "I said, 'Honey, nothing was wrong with the sound system. They didn’t laugh!'"

The pair always made one another laugh, often crediting humor with keeping the relationship strong. 

"The marriages of comedians, no matter how stormy, seem to last a long time, and I attribute it to laughter," Bob said in an interview with Parade in 2022. "No matter how intense the argument you're having, you can find a line, and then you both look at each other and start laughing. It's over, you know? I think that sense of humor is very important to the longevity of a marriage."

In January 2023, Ginnie and the Emmy winner celebrated their 60th wedding anniversary. Bob marked the milestone by posting a series of the couple's "favorite photos" together on social media.

Three months after the milestone anniversary, Ginnie died following a long battle with an illness.

"We lost our beloved Ginnie Quinn Newhart - Wife, Mother and Grandmother on April 23rd, 2023 after a long battle with illness,” Bob announced on X (Formerly Twitter) at the time. “She was our rock and we miss her terribly."

Never miss a story — sign up for PEOPLE's free daily newsletter to stay up-to-date on the best of what PEOPLE has to offer, from celebrity news to compelling human interest stories.

In 2020, the Elf actor was asked about why he was still performing amid the pandemic on CBS Sunday Morning. He responded that he was confident in where he would go if anything happened, so he was at peace with continuing his mission to spread laughter.

"I have a theory that when it's all over ... and you go up — I've been led to believe to heaven — and there's a God and he says, 'What did you do?' [And] I say, 'I made people laugh,' [He will say,] 'Yeah, get in that real short line over there,’" he joked.