Every episode of The Fall Guy opened with Lee Majors himself singing about the life of a stuntman nobody ever recognizes, a song called “Unknown Stuntman” that name-checked the stars of the day (Farrah Fawcett among them, the wife he was then separated from) and was later released as a single. Glen A. Larson, the producer behind the show, wrote it with Gail Jensen and Dave Somerville, and it set the tone for everything that followed: a little self-mocking and a little sentimental, with a pickup truck about to fly off a ramp.
ABC aired The Fall Guy from November 4, 1981, to May 2, 1986, and over five seasons and 113 episodes Majors played Colt Seavers, a Hollywood stuntman who paid the bills by chasing bail jumpers on the side. His cousin Howie rode shotgun, fellow stunt pro Jody Banks kept both men honest, and a rotating cast of bail bondswomen handed out the assignments. Four decades later, the people behind that truck have had very different lives, and some of them are no longer with us.
Is Nedra Volz Still Alive?
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By the time the show reached its fifth and final season, Colt needed a new boss, and the producers found her in Nedra Volz. She played Pearl Sperling, a no-nonsense bail bond agent who sent Colt after his fugitives in seven episodes during 1985 and 1986, and the part turned out to be her last regular series role.
Viewers already knew her face well, because Volz had built a whole second career out of playing feisty older women. She was Adelaide Brubaker, the housekeeper who looked after the Drummond household on Diff’rent Strokes for 22 episodes, and she turned up in Hazzard County as postal clerk Emma Tisdale on The Dukes of Hazzard. Before any of that, she had been a vaudeville singer, and she did not land her first film role until 1973, when she was already in her sixties.
Nedra Volz died on January 20, 2003, in Mesa, Arizona, of complications from Alzheimer’s disease. She was 94, and she had kept working into the 1990s, including a turn in the 1988 comedy Earth Girls Are Easy.
Is Markie Post Still Alive?
Before Pearl ever showed up, the woman handing Colt his cases was Terri Michaels, played by Markie Post from 1982 to 1985. Post arrived in the second season and brought a quick, warm comic energy to the role that suited sitcoms just as well. In 1985 she moved over to Night Court as public defender Christine Sullivan, the part most fans remember her for, and she stayed until the courtroom comedy closed in 1992.
She went straight from Judge Harry Stone’s bench into Hearts Afire opposite John Ritter, playing Georgie Anne Lahti on CBS from 1992 to 1995. A whole new audience met her in 1998 as Cameron Diaz’s mother in There’s Something About Mary, and she kept taking guest roles on television for another two decades.
What almost nobody knew was how hard those later years had been. Markie Post died at her home in Los Angeles on August 7, 2021, at age 70, and her family revealed that she had been fighting cancer for “three year, ten month[s]” while she kept working through chemotherapy. In their statement, reported by NPR and CNN, they said they were proudest of who she was off camera, “a person who made elaborate cakes for friends, sewed curtains for first apartments,” and who showed them how to be kind in a harsh world. She was survived by her husband of nearly 40 years, writer Michael A. Ross, and their daughters Kate and Daisy, and as we wrote in our report on her passing, fans of both her shows mourned her together.
Is Jo Ann Pflug Still Alive?
The very first bondswoman in Colt’s life was Samantha “Big Jack” Jack, and the actress who played her in the 1981 to 1982 season already had a long résumé. Jo Ann Pflug had been Lt. Maria “Dish” Schneider in Robert Altman’s 1970 film M*A*S*H, the nurse who caused a stir in the surgical camp, and a few years earlier she had voiced Invisible Girl in the 1967 Fantastic Four cartoon.
Daytime viewers knew her even better as a regular panelist on Match Game, where she sat on the celebrity dais on and off from 1973 to 1981. She also starred as Lt. Katherine O’Hara in the 1979 TV version of Operation Petticoat. Her marriage to future Love Connection host Chuck Woolery lasted from 1972 to 1980 and gave her a daughter, Melissa, and in 1988 she married Charles Young.
After The Fall Guy, Pflug gradually stepped back from acting, with late film work that included Clint Eastwood’s Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil in 1997. She found a second calling as a motivational speaker and, as we noted when we caught up with her a few years ago, as a teacher of etiquette for children and professionals. In 2011 she was back behind a microphone, interviewing guests such as Pat Boone for The Jo Ann Pflug Show on Seaview Radio. Yes, Jo Ann Pflug is still alive, and she is 86 years old today.
Is Douglas Barr Still Alive?
If Colt was the muscle, Howie Munson was the hopeful kid cousin who wanted to be a stuntman too, and Douglas Barr played him for 112 episodes. Barr had come to the show from a single season on the construction-crew sitcom When the Whistle Blows, and his easy chemistry with Majors gave the series much of its humor. Howie mangled Colt’s money and pined after Jody, and he usually ended up hanging off the side of something.
When the truck was parked for good, Barr moved on to The Wizard as Alex Jagger and then charmed a different audience on Designing Women, where he played Col. Bill Stillfield, the romantic lead opposite Jean Smart, in 13 episodes. Kids of a certain age remember him as the small-town sheriff in the 1990 alien comedy Spaced Invaders.
The surprise came behind the camera. Barr became a busy director, starting with the 1995 feature Dead Badge and episodes of Sweet Valley High, and then made dozens of television movies, many of them for Hallmark, including Secrets of the Mountain. In 1998 he started Hollywood and Vine Cellars, a small, high-end winery in Napa Valley. He has been married to Clare Kirkconnell since 1984. Douglas Barr is alive and is 77 years old.
Is Heather Thomas Still Alive?
Jody Banks was the stuntwoman who could keep up with Colt on any job, and Heather Thomas made her one of the most famous faces of the early 1980s. Her pin-up posters were everywhere in that decade, and she made her film debut in the 1982 teen comedy Zapped! with Scott Baio and Willie Aames.
The success had a cost she later spoke about openly. Thomas became addicted to cocaine during her years on the show and went into rehab in the mid-1980s, and once she was clean she kept acting into the late 1990s. In 1998 she walked away for good, and in a 2025 interview on the Still Here Hollywood podcast, reported by Entertainment Weekly, she described just how bad it had become. “I was just getting so many stalkers and really, really bad,” she said. “I had tons of restraining orders.” One man cut through the screen of her bedroom window, and she defended herself. “I shot him with rock salt and birdshot,” she recalled, and with two young daughters at home and “a guy’s jumping our gate with a giant buck knife,” she decided Hollywood was not worth it. We wrote more about that frightening chapter when she first told it.
Away from the cameras, Thomas wrote the novel Trophies, published in 2008, and became an active political fundraiser. Her husband of more than 30 years, entertainment attorney Skip Brittenham, died on July 17, 2025, at age 83. Heather Thomas is alive and is 69 years old, and in 2024 she put on a police uniform to surprise fans in a scene with the one co-star everybody wanted to see again.
Is Lee Majors Still Alive?
That co-star, of course, was Lee Majors. He was born Harvey Lee Yeary in Wyandotte, Michigan, and lost both parents before he was two, so he was raised by an aunt and uncle in Middlesboro, Kentucky. He played football at Indiana University and then Eastern Kentucky University until a back injury ended his playing days, and he went to Hollywood instead.
His break came as Heath Barkley on The Big Valley from 1965 to 1969, a role he won over hundreds of hopefuls including Burt Reynolds. Then came Steve Austin on The Six Million Dollar Man, the slow-motion bionic run that made him one of the biggest TV stars of the 1970s, and a marriage to Farrah Fawcett from 1973 to 1982. (We looked at who is left from that cast too.) The Fall Guy gave him a third hit series in a row, which kept Colt Seavers leaping off rooftops on ABC until Majors was 47.
When David Leitch, himself a former stuntman, set out to turn the show into a 2024 movie with Ryan Gosling, Majors gave him his blessing. “Whatever you do with it, I trust you,” Leitch recalled him saying, and he told NBC Insider that “Lee was really excited that it was finally getting redone.” Leitch invited Heather Thomas too, and the two old friends turned up as police officers in a scene during the credits. Majors told People he loved every bit of it except the timing, since by then “a lot of people are starting to get up and leave.” He and Gosling hit it off. “You can’t help but be friends with him,” Majors said. “He kept saying I was cool, so I guess we were cool.”
So, is Lee Majors still alive? He is, and he turned 87 on April 23, 2026. Married to Faith Majors since 2002, he still signs autographs for fans at conventions, and he still has new film projects in the works. “When I was doing The Fall Guy, I liked to put humor in there whenever I could,” he told People, and the stuntman who sang about never getting noticed has never once been unknown to the people who grew up watching him.
