Earlier this year, our Do You Remember? page posted an old photo marked “Taken 1960” with a clue that stopped plenty of readers mid-scroll. It described a convicted hitman and asked if you could recognize whose father he was. More than 3,000 of you clicked through to find out. The answer is Woody Harrelson, the 65-year-old actor who spent eight seasons as the sweet, slow-on-the-uptake bartender Woody Boyd on Cheers, and whose father, Charles Harrelson, spent most of his adult life in prison.
It is one of the strangest family stories in Hollywood, and it does not end with the father. Woody grew up mostly without him, and he has spent the last three decades raising three daughters with his wife, Laura Louie, in a household he describes very differently. Those girls are grown now, and each one has taken her own road.
Who Was the Man Behind the 1960 Clue?
Charles Voyde Harrelson was born in Lovelady, Texas, in 1938, and by the late 1960s he had become a contract killer. He was acquitted of one 1968 killing but convicted in the 1968 death of a grain dealer named Sam Degelia Jr., and he served five years of a 15-year sentence before his release in 1978. Woody was about 7 years old when his father walked out of the family’s Houston home in 1968, leaving his mother, Diane, to raise Woody and his two brothers on her own.
The crime that defined Charles came a year after his release. On May 29, 1979, U.S. District Judge John H. Wood Jr. was shot outside his San Antonio home, and History.com reports that drug trafficker Jimmy Chagra paid Charles $250,000 to kill the judge before he could sentence Chagra. Charles was convicted on December 14, 1982, and received two life sentences. After a failed escape attempt from the Atlanta federal penitentiary in 1995, he was moved to the Supermax prison in Florence, Colorado, where he died of a heart attack in March 2007, as the Associated Press reported at the time.
Woody kept in touch with his father through those prison years, visited him and helped pay for his appeals. His feelings stayed complicated. “I don’t feel he was much of a father,” he told People in 1988. “He took no valid part in my upbringing.” In the same breath he called Charles “one of the most articulate, well-read, charming people I’ve ever known.” That tug of war between disappointment and affection would shape the kind of father Woody tried to become.
How Did the Hitman’s Son Build Such a Different Family?
By the time his father’s trial made national news, Woody was on his way to acting, and in 1985 he walked into the Boston bar on Cheers as the farm boy from Indiana who replaced Coach. Two years later, in 1987, he met Laura Louie when she went to work as his assistant. The friendship grew into a romance, and the couple spent the next two decades together before they finally married in a ceremony on Maui on December 28, 2008, with family and friends looking on.
They built their life far from Hollywood. The family settled on Maui, and for years the girls traveled wherever Woody’s movies took him. “For a long time, they’d come with me wherever I went,” he told The New York Times in 2017. “Then they got into a really good school, and that was the end of traveling everywhere with Daddy.” The older girls were homeschooled for part of their childhood, which Woody has said was partly so the family could spend more time together.
The Cheers years also gave Woody a second family. His castmates still turn up in his life decades later, and you can see where every one of them is today in our look at the ‘Cheers’ cast members still alive today. The first of his own daughters arrived in 1993, the same year Cheers poured its last round.
What Became of Deni and Zoe Harrelson?
Deni Montana Harrelson, the eldest, was born in 1993 and is now 33. A June 2006 report from Fox News listed her as 13, and Extra described her as 30 when she joined her parents on the red carpet in February 2023. Woody has said she arrived at exactly the right moment. “I remember my daughter Deni coming along, and she was so pure and caring of everybody and everything,” he told Esquire in 2008. “My heart at that time needed her. I think it’s the best thing going, parenthood.” Deni has chosen a private life away from cameras and social media, and her rare public outings have come at her father’s side, including the New York premiere of his basketball comedy Champions in 2023.
Zoe Giordano Harrelson came next, born September 22, 1996, which makes her 30. She was the one who briefly stepped into the spotlight as a teenager. As a high school senior in 2015 she gave a talk about the toll cell phones take and the value of putting them down, a subject that plainly runs in the family, since Woody himself has said he refuses to carry one. That same year she played his daughter in U2’s “Song for Someone” music video, picking him up as he walks out of jail. Given the family history, it was a striking piece of casting. Today Zoe keeps no public social media and has stepped back from the attention she had at 18.
Both older sisters have kept their adult lives almost entirely out of the press, much as their parents have done on Maui for years. Their younger sister came along a full decade after Zoe, and she grew up closer to her father’s work than either of them.
Which Daughter Followed Woody Onto a Film Set?
Makani Ravello Harrelson was born on June 3, 2006, and turned 20 this summer. Her parents announced her birth with a statement only they could have written, saying they were “proud to announce the completion of our goddess trilogy with the birth of our third daughter, Makani Ravello,” and that they were “doing our part to balance the energy” in a patriarchal world, as Fox News reported at the time.
Of the three girls, Makani is the one who has acted in her dad’s films. According to InStyle, she had a small uncredited part in LBJ, the 2016 film in which Woody played Lyndon Johnson, and she then played a character named Deni, borrowing her big sister’s name, in Lost in London, the 2017 film Woody wrote, directed and starred in. She was 16 when she walked the Champions carpet alongside Deni and her parents.
Makani has stayed out of the headlines since, and so have her sisters. When Woody and Laura made a rare red carpet appearance together in September for Brothers, his Apple TV comedy with Matthew McConaughey, none of the girls were in the photos. The show plays on a family question of a very different kind, the one McConaughey revived in his birthday tribute to Woody.
For Woody, who got so little from his own father, the daughters are the part of the story he talks about most warmly. “My kids have always let me know what an idiot I am,” he told The New York Times in 2023, adding that they have “helped me to be a kinder, gentler soul.” He put it even more simply to The Guardian in 2018. “My wife and my daughters, they kind of loved me into a better human being.”
Who Is Still Alive From ‘The Mod Squad’ Main Cast?