Gary Portnoy’s piano opens, and before he reaches the line about wanting to go where everybody knows your name, you can already picture the brick walls and the long wooden bar of a Boston basement tavern. “Where Everybody Knows Your Name,” which Portnoy wrote with Judy Hart Angelo, promised a place where your troubles waited outside, and for 11 years Cheers kept that promise every week on NBC.
It almost didn’t get the chance. The show finished 74th in the ratings in its first season, and NBC stuck with it anyway. By the time the bar closed for good on May 20, 1993, the Cheers cast had made 275 episodes and the show had won 28 Emmys, and roughly 93 million people tuned in to say goodbye. Some of the regulars who filled those stools have since said goodbye for real. Here is who is still with us.
Is Nicholas Colasanto still alive?
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Before he was Coach, the gentle, foggy-minded bartender who had once coached Sam Malone with the Red Sox, Nicholas Colasanto spent years behind the camera. He directed episodes of Hawaii Five-O, Bonanza and two of the most admired Columbo mysteries, “Etude in Black” and “Swan Song,” and he played the mob boss Tommy Como in Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull in 1980.
Coach was the role that made strangers wave at him in the street, but Colasanto was quietly ill. He had been diagnosed with heart disease in the 1970s, and his co-stars noticed him losing weight during the third season. He died of a heart attack at his Los Angeles home on February 12, 1985, at age 61, UPI reported. Production stopped for weeks, and the cast hung a picture of Geronimo that he had kept in his dressing room on the wall of the bar set. That photograph would come back at the very end of the series, and so would one more newcomer who walked through the door after a long run of success.
Is Kirstie Alley still alive?
When Shelley Long left in 1987, the producers took a risk and built the bar around a completely different woman. Kirstie Alley’s Rebecca Howe was an ambitious, insecure corporate manager who never quite got the life she wanted, and Alley played her with a comic desperation that won her the Emmy for lead actress in a comedy in 1991. Ted Danson had needed eight nominations to win his own Emmy the year before, and on stage Alley joked that she was grateful she hadn’t had to wait as long as Ted.
Between seasons, she was a movie star in the Look Who’s Talking films, and after Cheers she headlined Veronica’s Closet on NBC for three seasons. In 2005, she made fun of her own weight struggles in Showtime’s Fat Actress, and she later danced on two seasons of Dancing with the Stars.
Alley died on December 5, 2022, at age 71, after a battle with colon cancer that her children said had been “only recently discovered.” Danson said he had been watching an old episode of the show on a flight when he learned the news. “I am so sad and so grateful for all the times she made me laugh,” he said, according to ET. Kelsey Grammer kept his statement short: “I always believed grief for a public figure is a private matter, but I will say I loved her.” Less than three years later, the cast lost the man everyone in the bar greeted by name.
Is George Wendt still alive?
George Wendt came to Cheers after six years with Chicago’s Second City, and he thought he was auditioning for almost nothing. “My agent said, ‘It’s a small role, honey. It’s one line. Actually, it’s one word,'” he told GQ. The word was “beer.” The producers liked him so much that they gave him a bigger part instead, and Norm Peterson never really left his stool again. Every time he walked in, the whole bar shouted “Norm!” and he earned six straight Emmy nominations from 1984 to 1989.
After the show, he played Edna Turnblad in Hairspray on Broadway and Santa Claus in the stage musical Elf, and he cheered on “Da Bears” with the Superfans on Saturday Night Live. He joked to the Associated Press that “if you stay fat enough and get old enough, the offers start rolling in.”
Wendt died in his sleep at his home on May 20, 2025, at age 76, on the 32nd anniversary of the Cheers finale. His death certificate listed cardiac arrest, with heart disease among the underlying causes. “I am devastated to hear that Georgie is no longer with us,” Danson said, and Rhea Perlman called him “the sweetest, kindest man I ever met,” as Variety reported. We looked back on his life on what would have been his 78th birthday. The rest of the main cast is still here, starting with a psychiatrist who rarely smiled.
Is Bebe Neuwirth still alive?
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Lilith Sternin first walked into the bar on a blind date with Frasier Crane, and her icy stare and severe bun made her one of the show’s great surprises. Bebe Neuwirth won back-to-back Emmys for the role in 1990 and 1991, and Lilith became a recurring guest on Frasier and appeared again in the 2023 revival.
Neuwirth was a Broadway dancer before she was a sitcom star, and she has won two Tony Awards, for Sweet Charity in 1986 and for playing Velma Kelly in the 1996 revival of Chicago. She originated Morticia in Broadway’s The Addams Family and spent three years on Madam Secretary.
Yes, Bebe Neuwirth is alive, and at 67 she is the youngest woman from the main cast. She earned a third Tony nomination playing Fraulein Schneider in the recent Broadway revival of Cabaret, appears in the Netflix film Don’t Say Good Luck, and has a run at the New York club 54 Below booked for this coming January, singing Kander and Ebb songs to mark 30 years of Chicago. The youngest member of the whole bunch arrived in Boston from a farm in Indiana.
Is Woody Harrelson, the youngest of the ‘Cheers’ cast, still alive?
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When Coach died, the writers needed someone sweet enough to fill his spot, and they found him in a 24-year-old Texan named Woody Harrelson. His Woody Boyd was a farm boy from Hanover, Indiana, who came to Boston to meet his pen pal, Coach, and stayed to tend bar. The role won Harrelson the Emmy for supporting actor in 1989.
No one from the cast has had a bigger movie career since. Harrelson earned Oscar nominations for The People vs. Larry Flynt, The Messenger and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, played Haymitch in four Hunger Games films, and partnered with Matthew McConaughey on the first season of True Detective.
Woody Harrelson is alive and is 65. He and McConaughey reunited for Brothers, an Apple TV comedy in which they play versions of themselves who discover they might be related, and its eight episodes run on Wednesdays through November 4, according to Apple. The woman whose place Rebecca took has kept a much lower profile.
Is Shelley Long still alive?
Diane Chambers was the overeducated grad student who took a job as a waitress and fell into one of television’s great on-again, off-again romances with Sam. Shelley Long won the 1983 Emmy for lead actress in a comedy, and the will-they-or-won’t-they between Sam and Diane carried the show through its first five seasons.
Then she walked away at the top. In a 2003 interview she said the main reason was wanting more time with her young daughter, and we told the fuller story of why Shelley Long left Cheers earlier this year. She went on to Outrageous Fortune, Troop Beverly Hills and The Brady Bunch Movie, in which she played Carol Brady, and she returned as Diane on Frasier, earning a guest Emmy nomination. Younger viewers know her as DeDe Pritchett on Modern Family.
Shelley Long is alive and turned 77 on August 23. Her last screen credit was the 2021 film The Cleaner, she rarely gives interviews, and she skipped the cast reunion at the 2024 Emmys. The know-it-all mailman who sat beside Norm, on the other hand, has hardly stopped working.
Is John Ratzenberger still alive?
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Cliff Clavin was not in the original script. John Ratzenberger, then working as an improv performer, asked the producers whether they had a bar know-it-all, and they liked the idea so much that they wrote Cliff for him. The postal carrier with a useless fact for every occasion earned Ratzenberger Emmy nominations in 1985 and 1986.
When Wendt died, Ratzenberger said he was “heartbroken” and wrote that “George brought Norm to life with a subtle brilliance.” The two had spent 11 seasons side by side at the end of the bar.
John Ratzenberger is alive and is 79, the oldest of the surviving cast. After Cheers he became Pixar’s good-luck charm, voicing characters in more than 20 of the studio’s films, including Mack in Cars and Hamm the piggy bank in every Toy Story movie. He was back as Hamm this summer in Toy Story 5, which opened June 19 and passed $1 billion worldwide, and he is set to voice Mack again in 2027’s Cars: Lightning Racers. The man who sat at the next stool over turned a guest role into one of the longest runs in television.
Is Kelsey Grammer still alive?
Frasier Crane came into the bar in the third season as Diane’s stuffy new boyfriend and was supposed to last a few episodes. Kelsey Grammer stayed nine seasons, then took the psychiatrist to Seattle for 11 more on
Grammer remembered Wendt on Gayle King’s SiriusXM show. “For 11 years, America waited for him to walk into a bar every Thursday night and say something funny,” he said, according to Rolling Stone. “He was extraordinary.”
Kelsey Grammer is alive and is 71. His Frasier revival ran two seasons on Paramount+ before it was canceled in January 2025, but he is busier than ever. He reprises Beast in Avengers: Doomsday in December, and in October TheWrap reported that NBC is developing Pops, a medical drama starring Grammer as a man who starts over as an EMT alongside first responders half his age. It would bring him home to the network where Frasier began. Carla, meanwhile, never lost her bite.
Is Rhea Perlman still alive?
Carla Tortelli was the tiny, sharp-tongued waitress with a growing brood of kids and an insult for every customer, and Rhea Perlman made her the bar’s secret weapon. She was nominated for an Emmy for every season but one and won four times, in 1984, 1985, 1986 and 1989.
She and Kirstie Alley stayed close long after the show, and Perlman joined her on the TV Land sitcom Kirstie in 2013. “Kirstie was a unique and wonderful person and friend,” Perlman said when Alley died. “I’ve never met anyone remotely like her.” She also played the cruel mother in Matilda, directed by her husband, Danny DeVito. The couple separated in 2017 but never divorced, and they share three children.
Rhea Perlman is alive and is 78. She played Barbie’s creator, Ruth Handler, in Barbie, and in 2025 she appeared as Dottie, the grandmother, in Lena Dunham’s Netflix series Too Much and as a guest on The Studio and Poker Face. That leaves the man who owned the bar.
Is Ted Danson still alive?
Sam Malone was a former Red Sox relief pitcher and recovering alcoholic who ran a bar and chased every woman who walked into it. Ted Danson played Sam for all 275 episodes and won two Emmys for the part. Since then, he has led Becker, CSI and, The Good Place, and he has been married to actress Mary Steenburgen since 1995.
Ted Danson is alive and is 78. He stars as retired professor turned undercover investigator Charles Nieuwendyk in Netflix’s A Man on the Inside, which Netflix renewed for a third season in February. Danson said he was “so excited to see where Charles Nieuwendyk goes next.” Each week he also hosts a SiriusXM podcast with Woody Harrelson, and they named it Where Everybody Knows Your Name.
He has carried Wendt’s loss with him. “It is going to take me a long time to get used to this,” he said in May 2025. “I love you, Georgie.” The goodbye that stays with most fans, though, is from the last night the bar was open in 1993. After everyone has gone home, Sam tells a customer knocking at the door, “Sorry, we’re closed.” Then he walks to the back wall and gently straightens the picture of Geronimo that once hung in Nicholas Colasanto’s dressing room.
