The Only ‘Soap’ Cast Members Still Alive Today

Months before anyone had seen a single scene, Soap was already the most protested show on television. A Newsweek preview in June 1977 called it a “sex farce” without having watched the pilot, and church groups were organizing boycotts before the September 13 premiere. By one count 32,000 people wrote to ABC to complain. Then it aired, and viewers met the wealthy Tates and the working-class Campbells, two sisters’ families in Dunn’s River, Connecticut, tangled up in affairs, a murder trial, a mob contract, a possessed baby and one alien abduction. Every week the announcer recapped the wreckage and promised, “Confused? You won’t be, after this week’s episode of Soap.”

Susan Harris’s spoof ran four seasons and 85 episodes until April 1981, and it gave a young stand-up named Billy Crystal the role of Jodie Dallas, one of the first openly gay recurring characters on network television. It also launched a butler so popular he got his own show. Forty-five years after the cliffhanger that never got resolved, here is what happened to the Tates, the Campbells and the people who played them, with those still with us saved for last.

Is Cathryn Damon Still Alive?

Cathryn Damon played Mary Campbell, the patient center of the Campbell house, married to the twitchy Burt and mother to Danny and Jodie. The pilot was actually reshot with Damon in the role, and the gamble paid off with three Emmy nominations and a win in 1980. She was diagnosed with ovarian cancer in 1986 and kept taking small roles until shortly before the end.

Damon died on May 4, 1987, at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. She was 56, and the Associated Press obituary carried in The New York Times led with the Emmy she won for Soap.

Is Arthur Peterson Still Alive?

As “The Major,” the sisters’ father who still believed World War II was on, Arthur Peterson got some of the show’s oddest laughs. He had been acting since 1936, when he became the Reverend Dr. John Ruthledge on the radio version of The Guiding Light, and the North Dakota native later called the Major his “most memorable role,” according to Prairie Public’s Dakota Datebook. He spent his last working years on stage before retiring in 1991.

Peterson died on October 31, 1996, 18 days short of his 84th birthday. He was 83.

Is Richard Mulligan Still Alive?

Burt Campbell was a bundle of nerves who killed a mobster in self-defense, lost his mind more than once and was eventually swapped out for an alien double. Richard Mulligan played every bit of it with his whole body, and he won the 1980 Emmy for it. Eight years later he became Dr. Harry Weston on Empty Nest, the Golden Girls spin-off, and won a second Emmy in 1989 along with a Golden Globe.

Mulligan died at his Los Angeles home on September 26, 2000, after a long fight with colon cancer, CBS News reported. He was 67.

Is Robert Urich Still Alive?

Robert Urich only lasted part of the first season as Peter Campbell, the tennis pro sleeping with both Jessica and Corinne, but his murder drove the whole first-year mystery. He was soon a leading man in his own right as Dan Tanna on Vega$ and as the title detective of Spenser: For Hire.

In 1996 he revealed that he had synovial cell sarcoma, a rare cancer, and he and his wife, The Sound of Music actress Heather Menzies, started a sarcoma research fund at the University of Michigan. Urich died on April 16, 2002, in Thousand Oaks, California. He was 55.

Is Rod Roddy Still Alive?

We never saw his face on Soap, but Rod Roddy’s deadpan voice opened and closed every episode, ending each one with a string of questions like “Will Benson care?” Game show fans know that voice from 17 years of “Come on down!” on The Price Is Right, where he followed Johnny Olson in 1986.

His last episode aired one week before he died of cancer in Los Angeles on October 27, 2003, according to the Television Academy. He was 66.

Is Roscoe Lee Browne Still Alive?

When Benson left for the governor’s mansion, the Tates needed a new butler, and Roscoe Lee Browne arrived as the elegant, unimpressed Saunders. Browne had a voice made for the stage, and he earned a Tony nomination for Two Trains Running and an Emmy in 1986 for playing Professor Foster on The Cosby Show.

He died on April 11, 2007, at Cedars-Sinai after a long battle with cancer. The Associated Press gave his age as 81, though sources have long disagreed on the year he was born.

Is Robert Guillaume Still Alive?

Benson DuBois answered the Tates’ doorbell with a sigh and stole nearly every scene, but Robert Guillaume nearly passed on him. “When I got the role of Benson, I was not the happiest camper,” he said in 2016, according to TheGrio. “I had reservations, ’cause you’re serving food, you’re serving the family.” He found his way in, he added, when “I figured out a way to take some of the stench off the idea.”

That approach carried Benson into his own series from 1979 to 1986, where he rose from butler to lieutenant governor and won Guillaume the 1985 Emmy. A new generation knew him as the voice of Rafiki in The Lion King. DYR looked back on whatever happened to Guillaume and Benson a few years ago. He died of complications of prostate cancer at his Los Angeles home on October 24, 2017, his wife Donna told the Associated Press. He was 89.

Is Donnelly Rhodes Still Alive?

Dutch Leitner broke out of prison with Chester and ended up married to Eunice, and the Canadian actor who played him, Donnelly Rhodes, joined the opening credits for the rest of the run. Back home in Canada he later won a Gemini Award for Da Vinci’s Inquest, and sci-fi fans knew him as the chain-smoking Doc Cottle on Battlestar Galactica.

Rhodes died of cancer on January 8, 2018, at a hospice in Maple Ridge, British Columbia, Global News reported. He was 80.

Is Robert Mandan Still Alive?

Chester Tate was a cheating stockbroker who confessed to murder, escaped from prison and lost his memory, and Robert Mandan played him with a straight face that made it all funnier. Director Jay Sandrich had worked with Mandan on The Mary Tyler Moore Show and suggested him for Chester after deciding Richard Mulligan should play Burt instead. Mandan went on to Three’s a Crowd, the Three’s Company spin-off, and later returned to daytime on Santa Barbara and General Hospital.

He died in Los Angeles on April 29, 2018, after a long illness, according to TheWrap. He was 86 and left behind Sherry Dixon, his wife of 55 years.

Is Katherine Helmond Still Alive?

Jessica Tate floated through infidelity, a murder conviction and a kidnapping by a revolutionary called El Puerco with the same sweet bewilderment, and Katherine Helmond won a Golden Globe for her in 1981. Three years later she became Mona Robinson, Judith Light’s man-crazy mother on Who’s the Boss?, and won a second Globe. Later she voiced Lizzie, the Model T in Pixar’s Cars films.

Helmond died at her Los Angeles home on February 23, 2019, of complications of Alzheimer’s disease, Fox News reported. She was 89. “I was in love with her,” Tony Danza told Deadline.

Is Jimmy Baio Still Alive?

Now for the members of the family who are still here. Jimmy Baio was only 15 when he started playing Billy Tate, the youngest of Jessica and Chester’s kids, whose story took him into a cult called the Sunnies and an affair with his unhinged English teacher. The cousin of Happy Days star Scott Baio had already played Carmen Ronzonni in The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training in 1977.

Baio stepped away from acting after a final role in Barbra Streisand’s The Mirror Has Two Faces in 1996 and has kept his life private since. No death has ever been reported for him, and he is 64.

Is Diana Canova Still Alive?

Corinne Tate fell for a priest, Father Tim Flotsky, married him after he left the church and gave birth to a baby possessed by the devil. Diana Canova, daughter of the comedian Judy Canova, played her for three seasons before starring in I’m a Big Girl Now.

Canova is 73 and still working on stage in Connecticut. She played Melissa Gardner in Love Letters at the Press Box Theater in Southbury in September 2025, according to Voices, which noted she has retired from TV and film. BroadwayWorld lists her as the director of TheatreWorks New Milford’s A Comedy of Tenors last fall and its Spring Awakening this summer.

Is Ted Wass Still Alive?

Danny Dallas spent four seasons dodging the mob in ridiculous disguises, and it turned out his real father was Chester. Ted Wass made his TV debut in the part, and a decade later he was Nick Russo, Mayim Bialik’s musician dad on Blossom. He began directing during that show and never looked back, calling the shots on Spin City, The Big Bang Theory and 2 Broke Girls.

Wass, now 74, stepped back in front of the camera in 2022 to play Bialik’s father once more on Call Me Kat, a reunion ET covered with exclusive photos.

Is Jay Johnson Still Alive?

Chuck Campbell was the quiet one, and his dummy Bob said every rude thing Chuck wouldn’t. Jay Johnson won the part at an open call, he told The Washington Times in 2015, and the original Bob went to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History in 2007.

That same year Johnson won a Tony Award for his one-man Broadway show Jay Johnson: The Two and Only! He is 77 and still touring it, including a September 2025 stop in Ventura, California, and he was a featured performer at VentFest, the ventriloquist festival, this past July.

Is Jennifer Salt Still Alive?

Eunice Tate was the snob of the family, the daughter Benson flatly refused to speak to. Jennifer Salt, whose father Waldo Salt wrote Midnight Cowboy, had already worked in that film and in Brian De Palma’s Sisters before Soap. She left acting around 1990 and reinvented herself as a writer.

It worked. Salt spent seven seasons writing and producing Nip/Tuck, co-wrote the screenplay for Eat Pray Love with Ryan Murphy, and is listed by FX as an executive producer on American Horror Story‘s 13th season, which premiered this September. She is 82, and Hello! caught her at 81 on a rare public outing in Los Angeles, 35 years after she left Hollywood.

Is Billy Crystal Still Alive?

Jodie Dallas loved a football star, considered a sex-change operation and later fought for custody of his daughter, and Billy Crystal played him with real tenderness at a time when that took nerve. Bob Seagren, the Olympic pole vaulter, played Jodie’s quarterback boyfriend. “It was very difficult at the time,” Crystal told reporters in 2015, according to TheWrap. “I did it in front of a live audience and there were times when I would say to Bob [Seagren], ‘I love you,’ and the audience would laugh nervously. I wanted to stop the taping and go, ‘What is your problem?'”

Crystal went on to Saturday Night Live, When Harry Met Sally…, City Slickers and nine turns hosting the Oscars, and he and Janice have shared a marriage of more than five decades. At 78 he is back on Broadway in 860, a one-man show named for the address of the Pacific Palisades home he and Janice lived in for 46 years before the 2025 fires took it. “I invite you to come inside 860 and I’ll tell you all the funny and touching things that happened there,” he said when it was announced, according to the Associated Press. It opened at the Imperial Theatre on October 21, and it has already been extended to February 14, 2027.