When Mike and Gloria packed up for California at the end of All in the Family‘s eighth season, the house at 704 Hauser Street suddenly felt very quiet. The writers filled it with a small, sharp-eyed girl named Stephanie Mills, the daughter of Edith’s cousin Floyd, who left her on the Bunkers’ doorstep and never came back for her. Danielle Brisebois was nine years old when she took the part, and she stayed with Archie through the end of the original show and all four seasons of Archie Bunker’s Place.
Brisebois, who was born June 28, 1969, in Brooklyn, is 57 today, and she has not acted in decades. What she did instead is a story most All in the Family fans have never heard, and it ends at the Academy Awards. As TV Insider and Remind Magazine noted this week, the girl in Archie’s kitchen grew up into someone very different. The road there started on a Broadway stage.
How Did A Broadway Orphan End Up In The Bunker House?
Before television, Brisebois was one of the original orphans in Annie, which opened on Broadway on April 21, 1977. She played Molly, the littlest of the girls. According to Looper, Carroll O’Connor loved her performance in the show, and when Rob Reiner and Sally Struthers left after the eighth season, he had her written into All in the Family as Edith’s young relative.
Stephanie arrived in the 1978 to 1979 season, the show’s ninth and last. She was lonely and a little bratty, and she was never sure whether Archie actually wanted her around. Brisebois said later that she knew the type from the inside. “In the beginning, Stephanie may have been how I was, in a sense,” she said, as MeTV recounted. “For instance, I was from New York, and I spoke New Yorkese. In fact, before All in the Family, I took diction lessons to get rid of the accent. Then I had to get it back to play Stephanie.”
She also gave O’Connor credit for building the character with her. “The character was never really described to me. But that’s how Carroll and I developed her together,” she said in Donna McCrohan’s history of the show, Archie and Edith and Mike and Gloria. And she knew exactly what Stephanie did to Archie. “I had him in the palm of my hand. I could make him do anything I wanted,” she said. That bond would be tested sooner than anyone expected.
What Happened To Stephanie After Edith Died?
All in the Family became Archie Bunker’s Place on September 23, 1979, and the focus moved to Archie’s bar. Jean Stapleton appeared in only five episodes of that first season before stepping away from Edith for good, because she felt the character had gone as far as it could. The show had to explain her absence, and it chose the hardest way.
The one-hour season premiere, “Archie Alone,” aired on November 2, 1980. It told viewers that Edith had died of a stroke about a month earlier. Stephanie admits in the episode that she cannot talk to Archie because he will not accept that Edith is gone. The scene everyone remembers comes when he finds one of Edith’s slippers under the bed. “It wasn’t supposed to be like this, you know. I was supposed to be the first one to go,” he says, in the moment Parade called the episode that left fans in tears.
From then on, Archie was a widower raising a girl who was not his own, and Brisebois grew up on camera in 81 episodes of the spinoff. Her work earned her a Golden Globe nomination for Best Supporting Actress in 1982, when she was 12. The show ended its first run on April 4, 1983, without a proper finale, which frustrated O’Connor. He died on June 21, 2001, at 76, and you can read more about the rest of the family in our look at the ‘All in the Family’ cast members still with us. By then, his TV ward had already started a second life in music.
Why Did Danielle Brisebois Leave Acting Behind?
Brisebois took a few more roles after Archie Bunker’s Place, but by the end of the 1980s she was writing songs. Her songwriting partner was Gregg Alexander, and in 1994 she released her debut album, Arrive All Over You, which he helped make. A second solo album, Portable Life, followed.
Then Alexander formed a band called New Radicals, and Brisebois joined him on keyboards, percussion and backing vocals. Their album Maybe You’ve Been Brainwashed Too came out in October 1998, and its first single was “You Get What You Give.” If you had a radio on in the winter of 1998, you heard it. The song went to No. 1 in Canada and New Zealand and reached the top five in the United Kingdom.
Alexander broke up the band in July 1999, saying he was tired of touring and wanted to write and produce for other artists. Brisebois went with him behind the scenes. That decision is how the girl from Hauser Street ended up writing one of the biggest pop songs of the next decade.
Which Hit Song Did Danielle Brisebois Write?
In 2004, a young British singer named Natasha Bedingfield released “Unwritten,” a song about a life that is still a blank page. The credits list three writers, Bedingfield, Danielle Brisebois and Wayne Rodrigues, and Brisebois and Rodrigues also produced it. It climbed to No. 5 on the Billboard Hot 100, earned Bedingfield a Grammy nomination and, in 2006, became the theme song of MTV’s The Hills.
The bigger moment came a decade later. Brisebois and Alexander wrote “Lost Stars” for the 2013 film Begin Again, and in January 2015 the song was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Song. On February 22, 2015, Adam Levine performed it at the Oscars, while the little girl who once sat at Archie Bunker’s kitchen table was among the nominees. “Glory” from Selma took the award. Brisebois took the nomination in stride. “It’s just a really great honor,” she said, according to Looper.
She has kept making music since. New Radicals reunited to play “You Get What You Give” for the 2021 presidential inauguration, and in 2026 the band quietly came back again, with a new song for the film One Night Only and a second album planned for 2027. Stephanie Mills spent four years trying to find where she belonged. The woman who played her found it, and if you have ever sung along to “Unwritten” in the car, you already know her work.
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