The Only ‘Uncle Buck’ Cast Members Still Alive Today

He pulled up in a battered old sedan that backfired loud enough to rattle the whole block, and before long he was flipping pancakes the size of hubcaps. Uncle Buck opened on August 16, 1989, and John Hughes’s story of a lovable slob left in charge of his brother’s three kids sat at No. 1 at the box office for four straight weeks. It went on to earn $66.8 million in the U.S. and Canada, and for a lot of families it became the movie you put on whenever a relative came to babysit.

Hughes shot it that winter in the Chicago suburbs, turning the gyms of an empty high school in Northfield into sound stages and using a colonial house in Evanston as the Russell home. Thirty-seven years later, the cast has scattered into Broadway, the pulpit and even the Oscar stage. Here is what became of each of them, starting with those we have lost and ending with the ones still with us today.

Is John Candy still alive?

Buck Russell was the role John Candy seemed born to play. He was a racetrack regular with a cigar, a girlfriend he wouldn’t marry and a heart far bigger than his manners, and Candy made every scene feel improvised because so much of it was. “He was the king of ad libs,” Amy Madigan, who played his girlfriend Chanice, told Vanity Fair in 2016. “He and John Hughes had worked together before, so they had a really neat shorthand.” That shorthand came from Planes, Trains and Automobiles and The Great Outdoors, and Candy kept working at a furious pace after Uncle Buck, turning up in Home Alone as the polka king Gus Polinski and coaching the Jamaican bobsled team in Cool Runnings.

Sadly, John Candy is not still alive. He was in Durango, Mexico, finishing the Western comedy Wagons East when he went to bed on the night of March 3, 1994, and he never woke up. According to HISTORY and his Wikipedia biography, he died of a heart attack on March 4 at just 43. He would have turned 76 on October 31. Colin Hanks’s 2025 documentary John Candy: I Like Me brought many of his co-stars back to talk about him, and our story on John Candy’s final days covers what his friends remembered about those last weeks.

Is Suzanne Shepherd still alive?

Every kid who ever got sent to the office cheered for the scene in which Buck goes to see Mrs. Anita Hoargarth, the assistant principal who has no patience for little Maizy. Suzanne Shepherd played her with a stone face and a prominent mole on her chin, which Buck can’t stop staring at before he tells her off on behalf of every misunderstood six-year-old in America. Shepherd had made her film debut only a year earlier as Aunt Tweedy in Mystic Pizza, and soon after Uncle Buck she played Lorraine Bracco’s mother in Goodfellas.

Television audiences knew her best as Mary DeAngelis, Carmela’s mother on The Sopranos, a part she played in 20 episodes between 2000 and 2007. She was also a respected acting teacher for decades. Shepherd is no longer living. She died in her sleep at her New York City home on November 17, 2023, at 89, as CNN and Entertainment Tonight reported, and her family said she had been living with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.

Is Jay Underwood still alive?

Bug was the boyfriend no uncle could tolerate, and Buck spends the whole movie trying to keep him away from Tia. By the end, Bug has been caught at a party with another girl and locked in the trunk of his own car until he apologizes. Jay Underwood already had a following from The Boy Who Could Fly and Disney’s Not Quite Human, and he later played a young Ernest Hemingway on The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles and the Human Torch in the 1994 Fantastic Four film that was never released.

Then he changed course entirely. Underwood is alive at 58, and he spends his Sundays in a pulpit. According to his Wikipedia biography and his own church biography, he felt called to full-time ministry in 2003 and went on to pastor First Baptist Church of Weaverville, California, for 13 years before he returned in 2021 to Calvary Bible Church in Burbank as its lead pastor. He and his wife, Julie, married in 1993 and have six children. His greatest joy now, his church page says, is “to see people learn and grow through the Word of God.”

Is Mike Starr still alive?

Only in a John Hughes movie could a drunk birthday clown turn into one of the most quoted scenes. Mike Starr played Pooter-the-Clown, who stumbles into Miles’s party in bad shape and mouths off to the wrong man, and Buck answers with his fist. Starr has spent a long career playing tough guys, and the same years brought him Frenchy in Goodfellas and Joe Mentalino, the hit man with the ulcer, in Dumb and Dumber.

Mike Starr is still alive at 76. He has kept working in series such as Ed, The Young and the Restless, The Blacklist and East New York. This spring brought sad family news, though. According to TMZ and the Associated Press, his older brother, the Halloween actor Beau Starr, died peacefully in Vancouver on April 24, 2026, at 81, and it was Mike who confirmed the news.

Is Garrett M. Brown still alive?

Bob Russell is the reason the whole story happens. When Cindy’s father has a heart attack, Bob has to rush to Indianapolis with her, and the only person left to watch the kids is the brother his wife can’t stand. Garrett M. Brown played Bob as a decent, harried man who loves Buck more than he lets on. Brown went straight from the film to one of the steadiest jobs in television, playing John Whitsig in 100 episodes of Sisters from 1991 to 1996.

Brown is alive at 77 and will turn 78 on November 7. Moviegoers later saw him as the father of the title hero in Kick-Ass and its sequel, and he won the Best Actor award at the Manhattan Film Festival for the lead in Hello, My Name Is Frank. He played Nicole Brown Simpson’s father, Lou Brown, in The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story, and Wikipedia and IMDb list his most recent work as a 10-episode run as Murray on Good Trouble in 2023 and 2024.

Is Elaine Bromka still alive?

Cindy Russell had no use for her brother-in-law, and Elaine Bromka let the audience see exactly how much it cost her to leave her children with him. Her nervous mother was the straight line against which all of Buck’s chaos played. Bromka was mostly a stage actress, with Broadway credits in The Rose Tattoo, I’m Not Rappaport and Macbeth, and on television she turned up in The Sopranos, Sex and the City and ER.

Bromka is alive at 76. Her proudest project may be one she wrote herself. With Eric H. Weinberger she created Lady Bird, Pat and Betty: Tea for Three, a one-woman play in which she plays Lady Bird Johnson, Pat Nixon and Betty Ford, and she has performed it for audiences around the country. On screen, she was recently seen as April, the leader of a support group, opposite June Squibb in Scarlett Johansson’s 2025 film Eleanor the Great.

Is Laurie Metcalf still alive?

Marcie Dahlgren-Frost, the divorced neighbor with designs on Buck, is a small role. Laurie Metcalf made it unforgettable, especially in the laundry room scene, where Marcie hears Buck banging on a stubborn washing machine and assumes something very different is going on. Metcalf was a Chicago stage actress from the Steppenwolf Theatre Company, and by the time Uncle Buck opened she was a season into playing Jackie Harris on Roseanne, the role that won her three straight Emmys from 1992 to 1994.

She is alive at 71, and she may be busier than she has ever been. She earned an Oscar nomination for Lady Bird, voiced Andy’s mom in the Toy Story films and played Jackie until The Conners ended in 2025. On June 7, 2026, she won her third Tony Award, this one for playing Linda Loman opposite Nathan Lane in Death of a Salesman. Broadway.com and Illinois public radio station WGLT both reported that she thanked the Loman family ensemble and said she shared the award with them.

Is Jean Louisa Kelly still alive?

Tia Russell was the hardest nut Buck had to crack, a sullen teenager who resented the move from Indianapolis and resented her uncle even more. Jean Louisa Kelly was only 16 when the cameras rolled in January 1989, and it was her first film. “The movie was challenging for me though in that, as my first film, it was a major culture shock,” she said in an interview later quoted by Looper. Audiences who watched her sneer at Buck all summer were surprised to hear her sing a few years later in The Fantasticks and Mr. Holland’s Opus, both released in 1995.

Kelly is alive at 54. She played Kim Warner for six seasons on the CBS sitcom Yes, Dear and has recorded several albums, including a set of standards called For My Folks. In 2022 she played Val Kilmer’s wife in Top Gun: Maverick, and in June 2025 she went on Good Morning America to promote her Lifetime thriller Girl in the Attic. You can read more about her journey in our story on Jean Louisa Kelly from snarky teen to soothing singer.

Is Macaulay Culkin still alive?

Miles Russell got the best scene in the movie: a rapid-fire interrogation in which a little boy grills his new babysitter about his job, his home and his marriage plans. Macaulay Culkin was eight, and a year later Hughes made him the most famous child in the world with Home Alone. Years afterward, Culkin said Candy had noticed what his home life was like before anyone else did. “I think John was looking a little side-eyed, like, ‘Is everything alright over there?'” he said in John Candy: I Like Me, as TheWrap reported. “I remember John caring when not a lot of people did.” We wrote more about that memory in Culkin’s reflection on Candy looking out for him.

Culkin is alive at 46, and after years of picking his projects slowly he is working steadily again. He received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame on December 1, 2023, and he and his partner, Brenda Song, have two young sons. He told Inverse that it was Song who insisted he belonged on Fallout, and he joined the Prime Video series in its second season as Lacerta Legate of Caesar’s Legion. He also lent his voice to Zootopia 2 in 2025.

Is Gaby Hoffmann still alive?

Maizy was the youngest Russell, the one who climbed into Buck’s bed and asked him the questions grownups dodge. Gaby Hoffmann was seven and growing up with her mother, the Warhol star Viva, in New York’s Chelsea Hotel. “‘Uncle Buck’ was really fun. Mac and I were the same age, and I felt like I was just having fun with my friend,” she told HollywoodChicago in 2012. “I remember John Candy’s presence much more clearly than that of John Hughes. He was incredibly loving, and any sort of paternal-type figure has been a draw for me, having not grown up with a father.”

Hoffmann is alive at 44, and her career has had more lives than most. After a run of 1990s films that included Sleepless in Seattle, she reinvented herself as an adult actress and earned three Emmy nominations for Transparent and Girls. Since then she has worked on Winning Time, Netflix’s Eric and the 2025 film Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere. In January 2026 she took the stage for a reunion that brought the room close to tears, and it led straight to the last member of this cast.

Is Amy Madigan still alive?

Chanice Kobolowski ran a tire shop and kept waiting for Buck to grow up, and Amy Madigan gave her a warmth that made you root for the two of them. In 1989 Madigan also played Kevin Costner’s wife in Field of Dreams, with a young Gaby Hoffmann as her daughter. When the New York Film Critics Circle honored Madigan this January, Hoffmann was the one who presented the award. People reported that she fought back tears as she described the warmth and laughter she remembered from that set. “I was a little girl and you were the ultimate mommy,” Hoffmann said.

Amy Madigan is alive at 76, and this has been the biggest year of her life. Her chilling turn as Aunt Gladys in the horror film Weapons won her the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress on March 15, 2026, a full 40 years after her first nomination for Twice in a Lifetime. According to the Associated Press and ABC, she saved her final thanks for Ed Harris, her husband since 1983. “None of this would mean anything if he wasn’t by my side,” she said, and in the audience he put his hand over his heart. You can catch up on her life with Harris in our earlier story about Amy Madigan taking her work home. Somewhere, the man who made her laugh so hard she could barely keep a straight face would have been the loudest one cheering.