“Good morning, Mr. Phelps.” Every week a reel-to-reel tape laid out an impossible job and offered the famous words “Your mission, should you choose to accept it.” Then it politely went up in smoke. A lit fuse raced across the screen while Lalo Schifrin’s theme pounded along in its unusual 5/4 time. Schifrin, whose music still opens every Tom Cruise sequel, died in June 2025 at 93, the Associated Press reported.
Mission: Impossible premiered on CBS on September 17, 1966, which made last month its 60th anniversary. Bruce Geller’s series ran seven seasons and 171 episodes until March 1973, and its Impossible Missions Force changed faces more than once along the way. Its first leader lasted one year. Later, a married couple walked away together, and a Vulcan arrived to fill the gap. Six decades later, only a handful of the agents are still with us. Here is what became of each one, starting with those we have lost.
Is Steven Hill still alive?
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Before there was Jim Phelps, there was Dan Briggs. Steven Hill led the team in the first season, but the show’s grueling schedule clashed with his faith. Hill was an Orthodox Jew who needed to be home before sundown on Fridays, and as the season wore on Briggs appeared less and less. When the show came back for its second year, Hill was gone, and the show never explained where Briggs went.
He walked away from acting almost entirely for about a decade and worked in writing and real estate in Rockland County, New York. The comeback, when it came, was a quiet one, with character parts in Yentl, Heartburn and The Firm. Then in 1990 he became District Attorney Adam Schiff on Law & Order, the dry, unflappable boss he played for ten seasons.
Steven Hill died on August 23, 2016, in New York at age 94. His wife told the Associated Press that he had been dealing with several ailments, FOX 5 New York reported. The man who replaced him would end up as the face of the whole series.
Is Peter Graves still alive?
Peter Graves took over in season two as Jim Phelps, the silver-haired leader who chose his team from a leather folder of photographs. He stayed until the very end in 1973 and won a Golden Globe for the role. Graves was the younger brother of Gunsmoke star James Arness, and he played Phelps with a stillness that viewers loved. “As we conquered the villains, I let the slightest smile just crease one side of my face,” he said in PBS’s Pioneers of Television in 2011, as quoted by the Television Academy.
That straight face made him perfect for comedy. In 1980, he played Captain Oveur in Airplane!, deadpanning some of the strangest lines ever spoken in a cockpit. He also returned as Phelps in the 1988 revival, the only original regular to come back full time. When the 1996 movie turned Phelps into a traitor, he took it personally. “I am sorry that they chose to call him Phelps,” he told CNN at the time, as Remind recounted. DYR has more on how the original cast felt about the Tom Cruise film.
Peter Graves died of a heart attack on March 14, 2010, at 83, four days before his 84th birthday. He had just come home from brunch with his family and collapsed outside the house, and one of his daughters tried CPR. He and his wife, Joan, had been married for 60 years.
Is Martin Landau still alive?
Rollin Hand could become anyone. Martin Landau’s master of disguise wore rubber masks and foreign accents for three seasons and earned him three straight Emmy nominations. Years earlier, he had played a menacing henchman in Hitchcock’s North by Northwest. Landau and his wife, co-star Barbara Bain, left together after season three in a contract dispute, as The New York Times noted in his obituary.
The couple went straight into the British science fiction series Space: 1999. Landau’s career dipped after that, and then it came roaring back. He was nominated for Oscars for Tucker: The Man and His Dream and Crimes and Misdemeanors, and he finally won for playing Bela Lugosi in Tim Burton’s Ed Wood in 1994. He also spent years running the Hollywood branch of the Actors Studio, coaching younger actors.
Martin Landau died on July 15, 2017, at UCLA Medical Center at 89. His family said he died of unexpected complications during a short hospital stay, ET reported. His exit in 1969 opened the door for an actor whose own show had just been canceled.
Is Greg Morris still alive?
Barney Collier was the team’s electronics genius, the man who wired the bugs and rigged the elevators. Greg Morris played him in all seven seasons, and for viewers in the 1960s it meant something to see a Black actor as the cool, brilliant expert the whole plan depended on. After the show he joined Robert Urich on Vega$ from 1978 to 1981 as Lieutenant David Nelson.
The family business carried on. His son, Phil Morris, played Barney’s son, Grant Collier, in the 1988 revival, and the elder Morris guest starred alongside him. When the Tom Cruise movie arrived in May 1996, Morris went to see it and walked out early. “It’s an abomination,” he said, according to the Associated Press and Deseret News accounts later collected by Remind.
Greg Morris died just a few months later, on August 27, 1996, at his home in Las Vegas. He was 62 and had been battling lung and brain cancer. Two of his seasons had been shared with an actor the world already knew by his pointed ears.
Is Leonard Nimoy still alive?
When Star Trek was canceled in 1969, Leonard Nimoy did not stay unemployed for long. He joined Mission: Impossible as The Great Paris, a former stage magician and master of disguise who stepped into the hole Martin Landau left behind. He played Paris for two seasons before leaving, reportedly worn out by the pace.
Spock came back, of course, in a string of Star Trek films, and Nimoy also directed the 1987 hit Three Men and a Baby. In 2014 he told fans he had chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and wrote that he had quit smoking 30 years earlier, “Not soon enough,” CBC News reported.
Leonard Nimoy died at his Bel Air home on February 27, 2015, at 83. His wife, Susan Bay Nimoy, said the cause was end-stage COPD. From here on, the story gets happier, because the rest of these agents are still with us.
Is Lesley Ann Warren still alive?
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Lesley Ann Warren joined in 1970 as Dana Lambert for the show’s fifth season and earned a Golden Globe nomination for it. She had already starred as television’s Cinderella in 1965.
She earned an Oscar nomination for Victor/Victoria in 1982 and made comedy fans very happy as Miss Scarlet in Clue three years later. A Golden Globe followed for the miniseries 79 Park Avenue. Later audiences found her on Desperate Housewives and in a 2025 episode of 9-1-1, and Looper noted this year that she is still working steadily.
Yes, Lesley Ann Warren is alive. She turned 80 on August 16, 2026, and she has been married to advertising executive Ron Taft since 2000. Her co-star that season grew a mustache that would become famous.
Is Sam Elliott still alive?
Before the voice and the mustache made him a Western hero, Sam Elliott was Dr. Doug Robert, a medical man who joined the team for several episodes in the 1970 and 1971 season. It was one of his first steady jobs on television. A year earlier he had a tiny part as a card player in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, a film that starred Katharine Ross, the actress he married in 1984.
Tombstone, Road House and The Big Lebowski made that baritone familiar to everyone, and in 2019 he earned his first Oscar nomination for A Star Is Born. He won a SAG Award for the Yellowstone prequel 1883 and joined Taylor Sheridan’s Landman in its second season.
Yes, Sam Elliott is alive and still working. He turned 82 on August 9. The next agent on our list arrived when the series needed a new leading lady.
Is Lynda Day George still alive?
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Lynda Day George joined in 1971 as Casey and stayed for the last two seasons, earning a Golden Globe nomination and a 1973 Emmy nomination. “I felt right at home from the start,” she told Fox News in 2021. “The cast was wonderful. They were so kind and welcoming to me.” When she went on maternity leave in the final season, Ironside Emmy winner Barbara Anderson stepped in as Mimi Davis for seven missions. Anderson retired from acting after the 1993 reunion film The Return of Ironside and has kept out of public view since.
George married actor Christopher George in 1970, and they were together until he died of a heart attack in 1983 at 52. “He was my precious person. Always will be,” she told Fox News. She worked only now and then after his death, with guest roles on Fantasy Island and Murder, She Wrote, and in 1989 she played Casey once more opposite Peter Graves in the revival. “It felt like old times again,” she said.
Yes, Lynda Day George is alive. She is 81 and will turn 82 on December 11. In that 2021 interview, she sounded ready for more: “I think every actor reaches a point in their lives where they want to go back to performing.” The last two names on this list were there from the very first mission.
Is Peter Lupus still alive?
Willy Armitage was the muscle. Peter Lupus, a former Mr. Indianapolis who had made Italian sword-and-sandal films under the name Rock Stevens, played the strong, silent agent who lifted whatever needed lifting. His part grew because the audience asked for it. “The studio got quite a bit of fan mail about me, so they have worked to beef up my part,” he told Muscle Training Illustrated in 1968, according to the Television Academy. He stayed for all seven seasons.
Afterward, he turned up as Norberg in the cult comedy Police Squad! in 1982, and he never stopped training. In 2007, to mark his 75th birthday, he lifted a combined 77,560 pounds in under 25 minutes to set a record. He later poked fun at his old show in the spoof films Mission: Irreparable and Mission: Imposter.
Yes, Peter Lupus is alive. He turned 94 on June 17, and he has been married to Sharon Hildebrand since 1960. Their son, Peter Lupus III, followed him into acting. He is one of only two people left from the team that took that first mission in 1966.
Is Barbara Bain still alive?
The other is the woman they first called “The Girl.” Barbara Bain, born Mildred Fogel in Chicago, played Cinnamon Carter, the model turned agent whose beauty was always part of the plan. “It was written for Martin and ‘The Girl,’ as she was first called,” she once told a reporter, according to the Television Academy. She turned that sketch into a character so sharp that she won three Emmys in a row, from 1967 to 1969.
After she and Landau left, she co-starred with him again on Space: 1999, and the couple raised two daughters, producer Susan Landau Finch and actress Juliet Landau. Bain and Landau divorced in 1993. She received her star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2016 and appeared in Sofia Coppola’s On the Rocks in 2020, and she has never formally hung it up, as DYR reported when she turned 95 and said she still isn’t retired.
Yes, Barbara Bain is alive. She turned 95 on September 13, just four days before her old show turned 60. She looks back on the part with pride. “She was a woman doing work with the boys, and there wasn’t any separation between us,” she said of Cinnamon in the book Glamour, Gidgets and the Girl Next Door.