If you hear the first soft notes of “Angela,” the Bob James theme that played over a Checker cab rolling across the Queensboro Bridge, you can probably still picture the rest: the grimy Sunshine Cab Company garage in Manhattan, Louie barking from his dispatch cage, and a crew of drivers who all swore they were only driving a cab until something better came along. Only Alex Rieger admitted he was a cabbie for good. James L. Brooks and his partners built the show from a 1975 New York magazine story about a Greenwich Village taxi garage, and Taxi premiered on ABC on September 12, 1978.
It ran four seasons on ABC and, after a cancellation that stunned its fans, one more on NBC before signing off in June 1983 with 114 episodes. Along the way it won Outstanding Comedy Series three years in a row, from 1979 to 1981, and 18 Emmys in all. The Taxi cast has stayed close for more than four decades, and some of them are still working in 2026. Here is who has left us, and who is still behind the wheel.
Is Andy Kaufman still alive?
Latka Gravas, the gentle mechanic from a country nobody could find on a map, was born from Andy Kaufman’s stage act “Foreign Man.” Kaufman disliked sitcoms and only took the part after his manager, George Shapiro, convinced him the money could fund his own work. He worked a famously short week, often coming in only for Tuesday run-throughs and Friday tapings, and he made the producers hire his abrasive lounge-singer alter ego Tony Clifton for a guest spot as if Clifton were a real man. Clifton was fired and escorted off the Paramount lot. “Andy said that was one of the greatest moments of his life,” co-creator James L. Brooks recalled to The Hollywood Reporter in 2018, as SlashFilm retold the story, and Tony Danza added, “I happened to have a Super 8 camera with me and shot the whole thing.”
His castmates still talk about him with real tenderness. “Andy never made a mistake. He may not have rehearsed, but he never made a mistake. He was such a genius,” Danza said on The Creative Coalition’s Hollywood at Home in 2023. Marilu Henner told Fox News, “I loved him. I loved Andy Kaufman. I got along very well with him. He was very special.”
Sadly, no. Andy Kaufman died of lung cancer on May 16, 1984, at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. He was 35, less than a year after Taxi left the air. Jim Carrey played him in the 1999 film Man on the Moon. The next driver on our list also left far too soon.
Is Jeff Conaway still alive?
Bobby Wheeler was the handsome, hopeful actor of the garage, always one audition away from his big break. Jeff Conaway knew that world well. He had played Danny Zuko on Broadway in Grease and was Kenickie in the 1978 film when he campaigned for the Taxi role and won it after a reading with Judd Hirsch. He left as a regular after three seasons, and he was blunt about why. “They dishonored me. They disrespected me, they didn’t keep their deal,” he told the Calgary Herald in 2008, as Mental Floss later reported.
He found a second home in science fiction as security officer Zack Allan on Babylon 5, but his struggle with addiction became public when he joined Celebrity Rehab with Dr. Drew in 2008. Henner never stopped thinking of him as family. “Jeff was like my brother, you know? He was a lot of fun,” she told Fox News in 2021. His death, she said, was “another devastating experience.”
No. Conaway was found unconscious on May 11, 2011, and died on May 27, 2011, in Encino, California, of complications of pneumonia, after a long and public fight with addiction. He was 60. The rest of the garage, happily, is a much longer story, and it starts with a woman Louie actually loved.
Is Rhea Perlman still alive?
Zena Sherman was the sweet, sensible young woman who, to everyone’s disbelief, dated Louie De Palma. Rhea Perlman played her in a handful of episodes between 1979 and 1982, and the chemistry was no act. She and Danny DeVito had been together since 1971, and they married on January 28, 1982, while Taxi was still in production. That same year she walked into Cheers as Carla Tortelli, a role that won her four Emmys.
Yes. Rhea Perlman is 78 and still working. She played Dottie, the saucy grandmother in Lena Dunham’s Netflix series Too Much, and Seth Rogen’s mother on The Studio in 2025. “I’m actually thrilled to be working in that, to be working, period,” she told AARP. She and DeVito separated in 2017 but never divorced, and they remain close as parents of three grown children. Another Taxi marriage, this one on screen, gave the show one of its biggest surprises.
Is Carol Kane still alive?
Simka Gravas arrived in 1980 from Latka’s own homeland, speaking his language, and she soon became his wife. Carol Kane, already an Oscar nominee for Hester Street, studied Kaufman’s made-up tongue until she could match it. “I thought it was so complicated, I wanted to sound just like him,” she said on The View in 2023. Kaufman once convinced her they had to practice with strangers somewhere no one would recognize them, and she showed up at his house expecting a trip to Mexico. They ended up at a Chinese restaurant, where she ordered in Latka’s language. “We sat there for a couple hours, pretending that I spoke it, and, in a while, I spoke it!” she told the hosts, as Entertainment Weekly reported.
The role won her Emmys in 1982 and 1983. Later generations know her as Valerie in The Princess Bride and as landlady Lillian on Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, and her 2024 film Between the Temples earned her the New York Film Critics Circle award for Best Supporting Actress.
Yes. Carol Kane is 74 and is still the long-lived engineer Pelia on Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, which brought her back for its fourth season, Reactor reported in July 2026. The boxer who made the show’s opening credits his own is still performing too.
Is Tony Danza still alive?
Tony Banta was the good-hearted middleweight who lost far more fights than he won. Tony Danza was a real professional boxer training at Gleason’s Gym in Manhattan when producers spotted him, and the part was rewritten from an Irish heavyweight named Phil Ryan into an Italian middleweight named Tony. “They must really like me,” he thought at the time, according to Mental Floss, until producer Ed Weinberger told him they had changed the name because they feared he would not answer to “Phil.” That is also Danza driving the cab over the bridge in the opening titles. “‘Taxi’ was the greatest comedy school you can imagine because you got a joke and you had to make it work,” he said in 2023.
He graduated straight into Who’s the Boss?, which ran from 1984 to 1992, and later spent the 2009 to 2010 school year co-teaching 10th-grade English at Northeast High School in Philadelphia for the A&E series Teach: Tony Danza.
Yes. Tony Danza is 75 and has recently appeared as Stefano Marchetti on Starz’s Power Book III: Raising Kanan. In September 2026, he brought a new cabaret show, More Standards & Stories, to the Café Carlyle in New York, with tap dancing, ukulele, and stories about his father, BroadwayWorld reported. Elaine, the woman every driver had a crush on, has also landed back on stage in New York.
Is Marilu Henner still alive?
Elaine O’Connor Nardo was a divorced mother of two who drove a cab at night and dreamed of the art world by day. Marilu Henner came to the show from Broadway and grew so close to the cast that she still keeps them together. “We always stayed in touch with each other. We never lost touch,” she told Fox News in 2021, adding that the group held “a ‘Taxi’ Zoom every two months.”
After Taxi she spent four years opposite Burt Reynolds on Evening Shade, wrote a shelf of books on health and memory, and told 60 Minutes in 2010 that she can remember nearly every day of her life since she was 11, a rare condition called highly superior autobiographical memory.
Yes. Marilu Henner is 74 and is starring off-Broadway this fall with Shannon Purser in The Ask at Theater 555, running through November 22, 2026. “Henner’s pitch-perfect performance captures the unflappable narcissism of an entire generation,” TheaterMania wrote on October 15. The man in the dispatch cage, meanwhile, has never stopped working either.
Is Danny DeVito still alive?
Louie De Palma was the meanest little man in Manhattan, and he gave Danny DeVito an Emmy in 1981. Friends Michael Douglas and Jack Nicholson had warned him that television “uses you up.” DeVito told the Archive of American Television, “Sure, they could say that, they were big rich movie stars,” as Mental Floss reported. At his audition he tossed the script on the table and demanded to know who wrote it, and the producers could not stop laughing. “Danny became my mentor, my pal,” Danza said of him.
He went on to Romancing the Stone, Twins and the Penguin in Batman Returns, directed Throw Momma from the Train and Matilda, and has played Frank Reynolds on It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia since 2006.
Yes. Danny DeVito is 81 and turns 82 on November 17. This month he received an honorary Grand Prize at Spain’s Sitges Film Festival, where he presented Drag, a horror comedy he produced with his children Jake and Lucy. Asked about directing, he joked to Ara that the only reason he became a director was that God’s job was already taken. The next star on our list was never meant to be a regular at all.
Is Christopher Lloyd still alive?
Reverend Jim Ignatowski first wandered into the garage in season one to perform Latka’s green-card wedding in “Paper Marriage.” The writers had a problem at the time, because Randall Carver’s sweet country newcomer John Burns felt too much like Tony, and Burns was written out after that first year. Jim came back to stay in season two. Lloyd had resisted sitcoms, but that changed with one script. “And then he sent me the script for Taxi, and I got really into getting ready for the part,” he told The A.V. Club in 2012, explaining that he picked out every piece of Jim’s rumpled wardrobe himself. He won Emmys for the role in 1982 and 1983.
Two years after the show ended he was Doc Brown in Back to the Future, and after that came Judge Doom in Who Framed Roger Rabbit and Uncle Fester in The Addams Family. He earned another Emmy nomination for Hacks in 2024 and joined Wednesday in 2025 as Professor Orloff.
Yes. Christopher Lloyd turned 88 on October 22, and his first memoir, In My Own Time, is published by Grand Central on October 27, 2026. It covers his lonely childhood on a Connecticut estate and his long road to sobriety, as DoYouRemember? reported when Lloyd opened up about his private struggle. Even he is not the oldest member of the Taxi cast still working. That honor belongs to the man who held the whole garage together.
Is Judd Hirsch still alive?
Alex Rieger was the one driver with no illusions, the steady friend everyone else brought their troubles to. Judd Hirsch almost said no. He spotted a man laughing in the front row on the opening night of Neil Simon’s Chapter Two and assumed he was trying to ruin him, and that man turned out to be James L. Brooks. “I had just become a father and wanted to concentrate on the stage,” he told Closer Weekly in 2018. “I was 40, and thought maybe the series would last two years.” He won the Emmy for lead actor in 1981 and again in 1983, and he was so busy that Robert Redford had to “borrow” him from Taxi for Ordinary People, which brought his first Oscar nomination.
His second came 42 years later, for Steven Spielberg’s The Fabelmans, when he was 87. In between came Dear John, Independence Day and Numb3rs, and in 2025 he worked opposite Linda Lavin on Mid-Century Modern, her final onscreen role.
Yes. Judd Hirsch is 91, and he is still taking parts. This past April he played a Holocaust survivor who comes to the hospital on his 90th birthday in the two-hour season finale of Fox’s Doc, Blavity reported. When Fox News relayed that 2018 interview, Hirsch was already looking back on the show with pride. “The laughter was real,” he said. “Nothing had to be dubbed.” He also made a promise that he has kept for eight more years and counting: “I am not done yet if that’s what you mean. I have a long way to go!”
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