Markie Post would have turned 76 on Wednesday, November 4. She was born Marjorie Armstrong Post on that day in 1950 in Palo Alto, California, and for most of the 1980s she was the warm, slightly flustered public defender Christine Sullivan on Night Court, the one person in Judge Harry Stone’s courtroom who still believed in everybody.
When she died on August 7, 2021, at 70, the news startled people who had watched her for decades. Her family’s statement explained that she had been fighting for a long time, and it described how she chose to spend those years in a way that tells you a great deal about the woman behind Christine.
How Did Markie Post Go From Game Shows To ‘Night Court’?
Post didn’t start in front of the camera. According to the Associated Press, she began behind the scenes on game shows like Card Sharks and Double Dare, and Fox News noted she worked as an associate producer before acting took over.
Her first series-regular role came in 1982 as bail bondswoman Terri Michaels on The Fall Guy, opposite Lee Majors. She admitted years later that she was a wreck at the casting session. “My hands were shaking so I had them in my pocket,” she told Patch in 2011, and the casting director took it as poise. You can see where that cast ended up in our look at the surviving stars of The Fall Guy.
She made a guest appearance on Night Court in its second season and joined the cast full time in 1985, staying until the show signed off in 1992. Christine became the straight arrow to Harry Anderson’s card tricks and John Larroquette’s leering Dan Fielding, and the writers eventually let Dan fall for her. “He followed me. He realized I was the love of his life,” Post told Patch with a laugh.
Off camera, the cast became a family. Marsha Warfield, who played the bailiff Roz, put it simply in 2021. “I never heard a cross word from, to, or about her,” she wrote, as TVLine reported. That kind of reputation would matter a great deal in the years after the show ended.
What Did She Do After ‘Night Court’ Ended?
Post went almost straight into Hearts Afire with John Ritter, a CBS sitcom that ran from 1992 to 1995. She considered it her finest work, and the show’s retooling stung. “It was so heartbreaking. It was the best thing I had ever done,” she told Patch.
Movie fans know her as Sheila Jensen, Cameron Diaz’s mother in There’s Something About Mary in 1998, and Night Court fans got a gift when she and Harry Anderson played Christine and Harry once more on 30 Rock, where the two characters finally got married. When Anderson died in April 2018, she was heartbroken. “I am devastated. I’ll talk about you later, Harry, but for now, I’m devastated,” she wrote, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
She kept working steadily after that. She had a recurring role on the ABC family comedy The Kids Are Alright and made a Christmas movie for Lifetime. What almost nobody watching knew was what she was going through between takes.
What Was Markie Post Fighting In Her Final Years?
Her family shared the answer when they announced her death. “With great sadness, the family of actress Markie Post tonight shares her passing after a three year, ten month battle with cancer,” the statement began, as NBC and CNN reported. Her manager confirmed she died in Los Angeles.
The family never named the type of cancer. What they wanted people to know was how she handled it. “Determined to make it her ‘side job,’ Markie worked during chemo treatments,” they wrote, and the work they meant was that Lifetime movie and the ABC sitcom. She had been fighting the entire time, and she kept showing up on set anyway.
She left behind her husband of nearly four decades, writer and producer Michael A. Ross, and their daughters, Kate Armstrong Ross and Daisy Schoenborn. For them, the acting was the smallest part of her story. “But for us, our pride is in who she was in addition to acting,” the statement said. They remembered a woman who “made elaborate cakes for friends, sewed curtains for first apartments” and who “showed us how to be kind, loving and forgiving in an often harsh world.”
John Larroquette, who spent seven seasons trading barbs with her across the courtroom, wrote a tribute that ended the way fans felt. “We all wish she could have stayed longer but we thank the cosmos for blessing us and enriching the world with her for as long as it did,” he wrote, as Rolling Stone reported. The Night Court family has lost many of its own since, including Richard Moll, the gentle giant who played Bull.
On her birthday this week, it’s worth picturing her the way her daughters do: not on a soundstage, but in a friend’s new apartment with a sewing machine, measuring the windows for curtains.
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