“Where were you in ’62?” George Lucas asked moviegoers in the summer of 1973, and millions answered by lining up for American Graffiti. The whole film unfolds on one warm night in Modesto, California, the last night of summer vacation in 1962, as a handful of friends cruise the strip and try to decide whether to leave town in the morning. Lucas made it for $777,000, and it earned well over $100 million.
The cars got the attention, but the music carried the night. Lucas spent about $90,000 licensing the oldies pouring out of every dashboard radio, and the man spinning them was Wolfman Jack. The film earned five Oscar nominations, and its young cast, which we first followed in our American Graffiti cast then and now, scattered into careers nobody could have guessed. More than 50 years later, here is who is still with us, starting with the cast members we have lost.
Is Wolfman Jack Still Alive?
He played himself, and he was the one cast member every teenager in the audience already knew by ear. Born Robert Weston Smith in Brooklyn, he built his gravel-voiced character on XERF, a border station across the Rio Grande from Del Rio, Texas. “We had the most powerful signal in North America,” he liked to brag. Lucas paid him with a small share of the profits, and that sliver became a steady income for the rest of his life. “It’s kept meat and potatoes on the table for years for Wolfman and Wolfwoman,” he once said of his famous rasp.
He went on to announce NBC’s The Midnight Special from 1973 to 1981. Wolfman Jack died of a heart attack on July 1, 1995, at his home in Belvidere, North Carolina, at 57, just back from a tour for his autobiography. “He had just walked into the house, and was hugging his wife when he collapsed,” his manager, Lonnie Napier, told the Deseret News. The next loss was the man who led the Pharaohs.
Is Bo Hopkins Still Alive?
Bo Hopkins played Joe Young, leader of the Pharaohs, the greasers who drag Curt into a night of petty crime and send him off to rig a police cruiser. Hopkins made the menace feel half amused, which is why those scenes still play as funny instead of frightening. He was already a veteran by then, having played Crazy Lee in Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch.
Afterward he became one of the busiest character actors of the decade, with roles in Midnight Express, a run as attorney John Cooper on The Rockford Files and a main role as Matthew Blaisdel on the first season of Dynasty. Hopkins died of a heart attack on May 28, 2022, in Van Nuys. He was 84, CBS News reported, and his old co-star Ron Howard shared his condolences on Twitter. Less than a year later, the girl Howard’s character kept arguing with was gone too.
Is Cindy Williams Still Alive?
Cindy Williams played Laurie Henderson, Curt’s little sister and Steve’s steady girlfriend, who spends the night furious that he wants to see other people once he leaves for college. The role earned her a BAFTA nomination, and real life had a twist the film never mentions, because Williams was nearly seven years older than her on-screen boyfriend.
She and Ron Howard crossed paths again on Happy Days, where Williams and Penny Marshall guest-starred as Shirley Feeney and Laverne DeFazio. That one episode became Laverne & Shirley, which at one point was the top-rated show on television. Williams left early in the final season when she was pregnant with her first child, a fight told in our story on why Cindy Williams left Laverne & Shirley.
Williams died on January 25, 2023, in Los Angeles at 75. Her children, Zak and Emily Hudson, said she died after a brief illness and did not share the cause. Months later, the film lost the blonde in the white Thunderbird.
Is Suzanne Somers Still Alive?
She had no name in the script, only “Blonde in T-Bird.” Suzanne Somers drives past Curt at a stoplight, mouths “I love you” and vanishes, and he spends the rest of the film trying to find her. It was the start of everything for her.
Four years later she was Chrissy Snow on Three’s Company. When she asked for $150,000 an episode in 1980, ABC cut her role to a 60-second tag at the end of each show and then let her go, and Somers said she was fired for asking to be paid like the male stars. She bounced back with seven seasons of Step by Step and a second career selling the ThighMaster, a comeback we traced in our story on Suzanne Somers turning 80.
“Suzanne Somers passed away peacefully at home in the early morning hours of October 15th,” her publicist, R. Couri Hay, said in 2023. She was 76, one day short of her 77th birthday, and Hay said she had “survived an aggressive form of breast cancer for over 23 years,” OPB reported. The rest of the main cast is still here, beginning with the youngest of them all.
Is Mackenzie Phillips Still Alive?
Mackenzie Phillips was only 12 when she played Carol, the motor-mouthed kid who talks her way into John Milner’s yellow deuce coupe and ruins his night of cruising. She was so young that producer Gary Kurtz became her legal guardian during the shoot.
Two years later she was Julie Cooper on One Day at a Time, until drug use cost her the job in the early 1980s. “Thank God I got caught,” she said at a fan expo in July 2026, according to The List. She wrote the 2009 memoir High on Arrival about her addiction and her painful relationship with her father, John Phillips of the Mamas and the Papas, and in 2016 began working at Breathe Life Healing Center in West Hollywood. Our story on how Mackenzie Phillips overcame her childhood tells more of that road.
Mackenzie Phillips is alive and 66, and she turns 67 on November 10. In September 2026 she went on Valerie Bertinelli’s podcast to talk about her past and about reconciling with her old co-star Richard Masur, as Fox News reported. Up next is the only cast member who walked away with an Oscar nomination.
Is Candy Clark Still Alive?
Candy Clark played Debbie Dunham, the blonde with the bouffant who climbs into Steve’s borrowed Chevy with Terry the Toad and gives him the best and worst night of his life. The role earned her a Best Supporting Actress nomination, the film’s only acting nod, and three years later she starred opposite David Bowie in The Man Who Fell to Earth. She went on to Blue Thunder and The Blob, and later turned up in Zodiac, the 2017 Twin Peaks revival, and episodes of Criminal Minds that ran into 2025.
Candy Clark is alive and 79. In 2025, she published Tight Heads, a book of Polaroids she snapped in the 1970s and early 1980s of friends like George Lucas, Harrison Ford, and Steven Spielberg, which had sat in her file cabinets for about 50 years, Fort Worth Magazine reported. Each photo carries her handwritten notes, and beside one of Spielberg she wrote, “I had a little crush on him, but he had no interest.” Her onscreen date that night is still working too.
Is Charles Martin Smith Still Alive?
Terry “The Toad” Fields was the nervous kid on the Vespa who borrows Steve’s car for the night and spends it trying to be cool, and Charles Martin Smith made him the character everybody secretly related to. He brought Toad back for More American Graffiti in 1979.
He spent years making Never Cry Wolf, the 1983 Farley Mowat adaptation for which he also wrote much of the narration, and moviegoers know him as Oscar Wallace, the bookkeeper who suggests nailing Al Capone on taxes in The Untouchables. Smith then moved behind the camera, directing Air Bud in 1997 and writing and directing Dolphin Tale and its 2014 sequel.
Charles Martin Smith is alive and 72, and he turns 73 on October 30. He has long made his home in British Columbia, and in a 2024 conversation with TV critic Bill Brioux he looked back on the road from Toad to the director’s chair. The coolest guy on the strip is still around as well.
Is Paul Le Mat Still Alive?
John Milner was the oldest of the gang and the fastest, the drag-racing king of the strip in his yellow 1932 Ford, who sneers at the Beach Boys and refuses to grow up. The part won Paul Le Mat a Golden Globe as most promising newcomer, and his best work afterward came as Melvin Dummar in Jonathan Demme’s Melvin and Howard, which brought another Golden Globe nomination. He also played Farrah Fawcett’s abusive husband in The Burning Bed and starred in the cult horror film Puppet Master.
Paul Le Mat is alive and 81. He has not acted in years, but the hot rods never left him. In a 2011 interview with Hidden Films he talked about the car shows he attends, some featuring the yellow coupe itself, and his official website still invites organizers to book him. Now come the two cast members who became Hollywood royalty.
Is Ron Howard Still Alive?
Ron Howard was already a TV veteran from his years as Opie on The Andy Griffith Show when casting director Fred Roos suggested him for Steve Bolander, the class president who plans to leave Laurie behind. The film’s success, along with his performance, helped inspire Happy Days, which made him Richie Cunningham.
Howard always wanted to direct, and he got there fast with Splash, Cocoon and Apollo 13, then won Oscars for Best Picture and Best Director for A Beautiful Mind. Ron Howard is alive and 72. In 2026 he released Avedon, a Netflix documentary about photographer Richard Avedon, and he is at work on Alone at Dawn with Adam Driver and Anne Hathaway, due in 2027, Hello! reported on October 12. The man in the black Chevy who challenged Milner to a race went even further.
Is Harrison Ford Still Alive?
Harrison Ford was working as a carpenter, with clients like Joan Didion, because he was unhappy with the roles he was being offered, when Fred Roos sent him to read for Bob Falfa, the cocky out-of-towner in the cowboy hat. Ford was asked to cut his hair for the part and refused, so the hat was the compromise. Four years later Lucas handed him Han Solo, and Indiana Jones, Witness and The Fugitive followed. His turn as a gruff therapist on Apple TV+’s Shrinking has brought him Emmy and Golden Globe nominations late in his career.
Harrison Ford is alive and 84. Accepting the Life Achievement Award at the Actor Awards in March 2026, he joked, “It’s a little weird, isn’t it? I’m still a working actor!” according to Yahoo. That leaves the young man who got on the plane at the end.
Is Richard Dreyfuss Still Alive?
More than 100 young actors read for Curt Henderson before Lucas chose Richard Dreyfuss, and Dreyfuss carried the film’s heart. Curt is the one who cannot decide whether to leave, who chases a stranger in a Thunderbird all night and who finally boards the plane in the last scene while a white car rolls along the highway below. Within five years he had starred in Jaws and Close Encounters of the Third Kind and won the Best Actor Oscar for The Goodbye Girl.
His health is the question fans ask most. In July 2025 he cancelled a SharkCon appearance in Tampa with viral bronchitis, telling fans in a video, “I’m in a lot of pain,” as CBR and our own report at the time noted. In May 2026 he pulled out of a Jaws reunion in Burbank, citing “circumstances completely beyond my control,” according to Deadline, which gave no further details.
Richard Dreyfuss is alive and 78, and he turns 79 on October 29. He sat for a long two-part Jaws anniversary interview with The Daily Jaws in January 2026, and his shark story lives on in our look at the surviving Jaws cast. To the fans he missed in Burbank, he sent a message any American Graffiti fan would recognize from that last scene on the plane: “While I may not be there physically, I’ll certainly be there in spirit.”
