In October 1989, audiences settled into their seats and heard Bruce Willis’s wisecracking voice coming out of a newborn. Look Who’s Talking opened on October 13 of that year, and the idea behind it came from writer and director Amy Heckerling’s own nursery. She dreamed it up shortly after her daughter, Mollie, was born in 1985, according to a 1989 Los Angeles Times report preserved in the AFI Catalog. TriStar wanted the picture made cheaply, so the producers moved the New York story to Vancouver to free up enough money to pay John Travolta.
That thrift paid off handsomely. The comedy opened at number one with about $12.1 million and stayed on top for five straight weekends, and it finished with roughly $140 million at home and nearly $297 million around the world. It became the fourth biggest moneymaker of 1989 and led to Look Who’s Talking Too in 1990 and Look Who’s Talking Now in 1993. Thirty-seven years after the first film, the Look Who’s Talking cast has lost several of the faces we loved, and the ones still with us have had remarkable second acts.
Is Kirstie Alley Still Alive?
Kirstie Alley, who played the frazzled accountant Mollie Jensen, died on December 5, 2022, at 71. Born January 12, 1951, in Wichita, Kansas, she had already won over television audiences as Rebecca Howe on Cheers when Heckerling cast her opposite Travolta. Her family said she died of a cancer that had been discovered only recently, and her representative later confirmed it was colon cancer, as Fox reported.
Her chemistry with Travolta was not entirely acting. Alley was married to Parker Stevenson during filming, and she later said the feelings between the two stars were mutual but never acted upon. She called Travolta “the greatest love of my life” in a 2012 interview with Barbara Walters, and in 2018 she put it plainly on Celebrity Big Brother UK: “I did love him; I still love him.”
The night she died, Travolta wrote on Instagram, “Kirstie was one of the most special relationships I’ve ever had. I love you Kirstie. I know we will see each other again.” We looked back at that bond in our story on what Travolta and Alley meant to each other.
Alley played Mollie in all three films, and so did the woman who played her mother.
Is Olympia Dukakis Still Alive?
Olympia Dukakis, the sharp-tongued Rosie Jensen, died on May 1, 2021, at her home in New York City. Born June 20, 1931, in Lowell, Massachusetts, to Greek immigrant parents, she was 89. No cause of death was released, but her brother Apollo Dukakis wrote on Facebook, “After many months of failing health she is finally at peace and with her Louis.” He was speaking of her husband, actor Louis Zorich, who had died in 2018, and the family said in a statement reported by CNN that her daughter, Christina Zorich, was at her side.
By the time she played Mollie’s meddling mom, Dukakis had already won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress as Cher’s mother in Moonstruck, and Steel Magnolias arrived the same year as Look Who’s Talking. Her first cousin was Michael Dukakis, the 1988 Democratic presidential nominee. She is one of only three actors, with Travolta and Alley, to appear in all three films, and her brief scenes in each gave the series a little extra bite. The man who played Mikey’s real father brought a very different energy.
Is George Segal Still Alive?
George Segal, who played Albert, the married businessman who fathers Mikey and then bolts, died on March 23, 2021, in Santa Rosa, California. Born February 13, 1934, he was 87. His wife, Sonia Segal, said in a statement shared with Variety and Deadline that he died of complications from bypass surgery, and the Associated Press carried the news the same day.
Playing a cad was a stretch for an actor audiences tended to root for. Segal had earned an Oscar nomination for Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? in 1966 and starred opposite Barbra Streisand in The Owl and the Pussycat. A whole new generation met him in 2013, when producer Adam F. Goldberg cast him as Albert “Pops” Solomon on The Goldbergs, a role he played until the end of his life. Sony Pictures Television called him “an integral member of our Sony family.” Travolta’s character had family of his own on screen, and his grandfather was played by an actor famous for outliving the rumors of his death.
Is Abe Vigoda Still Alive?
Abe Vigoda, who played James’s elderly grandfather Vincent Ubriacco, died on January 26, 2016, at 94. He was born February 24, 1921, in New York City. His daughter, Carol Vigoda Fuchs, told Reuters that he died in his sleep at her home in New Jersey of natural causes, and that he had not been ill.
Vigoda’s face was familiar long before 1989. He was the doomed Sal Tessio in The Godfather and the weary Detective Phil Fish on Barney Miller, a character so popular that he earned his own spinoff, Fish. After People mistakenly reported his death in 1982, he spent the next 34 years cheerfully proving he was alive, and the joke became part of his act. One more familiar character actor turned up in the film’s medical scenes, and many viewers knew him from a cult television show.
Is Don S. Davis Still Alive?
View this post on Instagram
Don S. Davis, who played Dr. Fleisher, died of a heart attack on June 29, 2008, in Gibsons, British Columbia. Born August 4, 1942, in Aurora, Missouri, he was 65. His wife described it as a massive heart attack, and Variety reported that he had retired the year before to undergo surgery for a heart condition.
The Vancouver shoot put Davis in front of a much bigger audience than usual, and the timing could not have been better. A year after Look Who’s Talking, he became Major Garland Briggs on Twin Peaks, and from 1997 he spent years as General George Hammond on Stargate SG-1. His final turn came in Stargate: Continuum in 2008, and the writers of Stargate Atlantis paid tribute to him in their final episode by marking the death of General Hammond. With him, the losses among the grown-ups end, and the rest of this story belongs to the cast members still with us.
Is Twink Caplan Still Alive?
Twink Caplan, who played Mollie’s flirtatious best friend Rona, is alive and turns 79 on Christmas Day. Born December 25, 1947, near Pittsburgh, she is 78 today. She returned for Look Who’s Talking Too but passed on the third film, and her real partnership with Heckerling happened behind the camera. A 1992 Hollywood Reporter item described her as a film executive at Heckerling Productions.
That partnership produced one of the best-loved comedies of the 1990s. Caplan was an associate producer on Heckerling’s Clueless in 1995 and played Miss Geist, the softhearted teacher, then reprised the role as an executive producer of the ABC series. She went on to produce Heckerling’s Loser in 2000 and I Could Never Be Your Woman in 2007. She has kept a low profile since, and AOL reported in 2025 that she had been photographed running errands in Los Angeles for the first time in years.
The voice of baby Mikey, Bruce Willis, has also stepped away from the spotlight, for reasons his family has shared openly.
Is Bruce Willis Still Alive?
Bruce Willis, the voice of Mikey, is alive. Born March 19, 1955, in Idar-Oberstein, West Germany, he is 71. He was already a star from Moonlighting and Die Hard when he agreed to give a baby his deadpan inner voice, and People reported in 1990 that his deal included a share of the film’s gross. He came back to voice Mikey again in Look Who’s Talking Too.
In March 2022, his family announced that he had been diagnosed with aphasia and was stepping away from acting. On February 16, 2023, they shared that his condition had progressed to frontotemporal dementia. In that statement, signed by his wife Emma Heming Willis, Demi Moore and his five daughters and reported by the Boston Globe, the family said Bruce “has always found joy in life” and has helped everyone he knows to do the same. “Today there are no treatments for the disease, a reality that we hope can change in the years ahead,” they wrote.
Emma has since become a leading voice for FTD families. In August 2025, she explained that Bruce had moved into a one-story home with a team caring for him around the clock, a choice she said put their two young daughters first, and that the family visits him often. Her book about caregiving, The Unexpected Journey, came out the next month. During World FTD Awareness Week this fall, she shared a rare photo of him in the sunshine and wrote, “I will not let his diagnosis be in vain. I know how proud he would be to know that he is helping families living with FTD, other forms of dementia and their care partners be seen and heard.” That leaves the man who drove Mollie to the hospital, and his year has been a remarkable one.
Is John Travolta Still Alive?
John Travolta, who played cabbie and flight instructor James Ubriacco, is alive and still working. Born February 18, 1954, in Englewood, New Jersey, he is 72. In 1989, his career needed a hit after a string of disappointments, and Look Who’s Talking gave him one, with two sequels to follow before Pulp Fiction brought him all the way back in 1994. He has raised his children, Ella and Ben, since his wife, Kelly Preston, died in 2020.
The sweetest twist came this past May at the Cannes Film Festival. Travolta had brought his first film as a director, Propeller One-Way Night Coach, an hour-long story drawn from his 1997 children’s book about flying from New York to Los Angeles with his actress mother in 1962 when he was eight. His daughter Ella appears in it, and Apple bought the rights. Before the premiere on May 15, festival director Thierry Frémaux surprised him on stage with an honorary Palme d’Or, the Associated Press reported, and a visibly moved Travolta told the crowd, “This is beyond the Oscar, really.”
The love of flying that made James Ubriacco a flight instructor was Travolta’s own all along, and it took him nearly 64 years to put that first childhood flight on screen. When Frémaux told him the little film had been accepted at Cannes, he said, “I cried like a baby.” Somewhere, Mikey would have had a line for that.
