He strolled into the squad room with a shaved head, a three-piece suit, and a lollipop where a cigarette used to be, and by the end of its first season on CBS, Kojak had climbed into the top ten. Telly Savalas played Lt. Theo Kojak from October 1973 to March 1978, five seasons and 118 episodes in all, and the line he purred at cops and crooks alike, “Who loves ya, baby?”, stayed with him for the rest of his life.
Kojak never worked a case alone, though. Around him stood his old partner turned boss, an eager young detective, a big-hearted sergeant played by Telly’s own brother and a former stand-in who earned a badge of his own. More than half a century after the premiere, only one of those men is still with us, and his story may be the most surprising of all.
Is Telly Savalas Still Alive?
Before he was Kojak, Savalas was a newsman. He was born Aristotelis Savalas on January 21, 1922, in Garden City, New York, to Greek immigrant parents, and after World War II he hosted Your Voice of America for the State Department before moving on to ABC News. He did not land his first acting job until 1958, when he was already 36, and he made up for lost time quickly. Within four years he had an Oscar nomination for Birdman of Alcatraz, and moviegoers went on to know him as Archer Maggott in The Dirty Dozen and as the Bond villain Blofeld in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service.
Kojak himself began as a TV movie. Abby Mann wrote The Marcus-Nelson Murders in 1973, drawing on the real Wylie-Hoffert killings in New York, and the detective’s name was still spelled “Kojack.” CBS turned him into a weekly series that fall. Savalas won the Emmy for lead actor in a drama for that first season and picked up two Golden Globes for the role, and according to TV Insider, Kojak was reportedly Queen Elizabeth II’s favorite program by the time she met him at a 1976 state dinner.
The lollipop came early. TV Insider traced its first appearance to the episode “Dark Sunday,” where it was meant to help Kojak, and Savalas himself, cut down on smoking. Kevin Dobson later said the candy came from a stagehand’s shirt pocket, and that he flipped it to his co-star when Savalas wanted something in his hand for a scene. The gag cost the star something, too. His official website admitted the lollipops gave him three cavities.
CBS canceled the show in 1978 as the ratings slipped, but Savalas never really let the character go. He brought Kojak back for CBS in The Belarus File in 1985 and The Price of Justice in 1987. Then came five more TV movies for ABC in 1989 and 1990, with Kojak promoted to inspector and a young Andre Braugher at his side as Det. Winston Blake. How the original series lost its footing in the first place is a story of its own, and we told it in the controversies that ended Kojak.
Fame never fully erased the years of anonymity. “I made 60 movies before ‘Kojak’ with some of the biggest names in the business,” he once said, as the Associated Press recalled in his obituary, and still people would point and say, “There goes what’s-his-name.”
Telly Savalas died of prostate cancer on January 22, 1994, one day after his birthday, in the suite he had kept at the Sheraton-Universal Hotel since the 1970s. The wire obituaries that week gave his age as 70, but his documented 1922 birth date made him 72. His spokesman and longtime friend Mike Mamakos told the AP that his family was around him, and that the night before, Savalas had reached toward him to embrace him without saying a word. “He knew,” Mamakos said, calling him “the most giving and courageous man I ever met.” Savalas left six children, and you can read what they are doing today.
Is George Savalas Still Alive?
Every squad room needs a big, warm presence, and Kojak’s was Det. Stavros, the heavyset sergeant who, as UPI remembered it, usually had a half-eaten sandwich in hand on the way to a crime scene. The man playing him was Telly’s younger brother George, born December 5, 1924, in the Bronx. For the first two seasons the credits listed him only as “Demosthenes,” his middle name, so viewers would not confuse the two Savalas brothers on the same screen.
George had come up the hard way. Before Kojak he drove a cab and waited tables, worked in his father’s hotel and heating businesses and acted off-Broadway, and he taught acting for five years. He picked up film work in The Slender Thread, Genghis Khan and the World War II caper Kelly’s Heroes, and guest spots on Mannix and All in the Family. When Telly revived his detective for The Belarus File in 1985, George was back beside him as Stavros.
That reunion was one of his last jobs. George Savalas died of leukemia on October 2, 1985, at UCLA Medical Center in Los Angeles after an illness of about three months. UPI reported his age as 58, but his 1924 birth date made him 60. He left his wife, Robin, and six children, and Telly would carry on without his little brother for more than eight years.
Is Dan Frazer Still Alive?
Capt. Frank McNeil was the one man in the precinct who could tell Kojak no, partly because the two of them had once been partners. Dan Frazer, who played him in 117 episodes, was a New Yorker through and through. He was born November 20, 1921, in the West Side neighborhood then called Hell’s Kitchen, and he found his way into theater while serving in the Army’s Special Services division during World War II.
By the time Kojak came along, Frazer had already spent two decades as the kind of character actor audiences recognized without always knowing his name. BroadwayWorld listed his Broadway credits as including Goodbye, Charlie and Who Was That Lady I Saw You With?, and his first film role was Father Murphy in Lilies of the Field in 1963. Woody Allen cast him as the psychiatrist in Take the Money and Run, and he turned up in Cleopatra Jones, Car 54, Where Are You? and Barney Miller.
He kept working long after McNeil hung up his captain’s bars. From 1986 to 1996 he played Lt. McCloskey on As the World Turns, and in his later years he had small parts on Law & Order and in Allen’s Deconstructing Harry. His final film, The Pack, came out in 2009, when he was in his late eighties.
Dan Frazer died of cardiac arrest at his Manhattan home on December 16, 2011, at 90. His daughter, Susanna, told the Associated Press that her father was a “very truthful, naturalistic actor,” which is about as fine a compliment as one working actor can pay another. His wife of 56 years, Lillian, had died in 1999.
Is Kevin Dobson Still Alive?
Det. Bobby Crocker was the young partner who did the legwork, took the lectures and got the lollipop jokes, and Kevin Dobson played him in all but two episodes. He was born March 18, 1943, in Jackson Heights, Queens, one of seven children of a grammar school janitor, and before acting he worked the Long Island Rail Road as a trainman, brakeman and conductor. The Army had prepared him for the part in a way no drama class could. “I was a military policeman in the Army, so I knew how to hold a gun and throw somebody against a wall,” he told Boomer magazine in 2016, as Legacy.com recalled. After his audition, he said, “I got a call [the next night] asking if I’d sign a contract.”
The partnership lasted well past the final episode, and the two men remained friends. When ABC brought Kojak back, Dobson returned for the 1990 movie It’s Always Something, with Crocker now working as an assistant district attorney.
By then he had a second famous role. Dobson joined Knots Landing in 1982 as M. Patrick “Mack” MacKenzie and stayed until the show ended in 1993, winning five Soap Opera Digest Awards along the way, including one with Michele Lee for favorite super couple. In 2008 he became the fourth actor to play Mickey Horton on Days of Our Lives. Off camera he never forgot where he came from, and he twice chaired the National Salute to Hospitalized Veterans.
Kevin Dobson died on September 6, 2020, at a hospital in Stockton, California, at 77. Early reports said heart attack, but his representative told The Hollywood Reporter he had been struggling with an autoimmune deficiency. He left Susan, his wife since 1968, and their three children, Mariah, Patrick and Sean. Instead of flowers, his family asked for something he used to say: “If you love America, Thank a Vet.”
Is Mark Russell Still Alive?
Of all the detectives in Kojak’s squad, Saperstein had the most unlikely route to the precinct. According to his Wikipedia biography, which cites newspaper coverage from the 1970s, Mark Russell started out as Telly Savalas’s stand-in before the producers created the part of Det. Saperstein for him. He played the role through the whole run and came back for The Belarus File in 1985, which turned out to be his last acting job.
Long before Hollywood, Russell had seen real combat. Born in Brooklyn near Coney Island in 1929, he trained in Japan and was sent to the front lines in Korea, and in 1952 at Heartbreak Ridge a mortar round killed one of his men and wounded his right arm, as he told Denver7. Back in California he took a job in the mail room at Paramount and worked his way into the story department, and the small parts followed on Bonanza, The Twilight Zone, Hogan’s Heroes, Batman and Star Trek, plus a turn in Elvis Presley’s Viva Las Vegas.
He has never pretended to be more than he was. “I wasn’t a big star, but I worked with the best,” he told Denver7, adding that the residual checks once reached about $100,000 a year. He and his wife, Evellyn, were married 59 years and raised five children before her death.
Yes, Mark Russell is still alive. Denver7 gave his age as 95 in May 2024, which puts him at about 97 today. He lives a quiet life in Colorado, and when Military History Traveler sat down with him in December 2025, it reported that he had recently served as grand marshal of a parade of American Legion veterans. In 2024 the BOLDERBoulder race honored him at its Memorial Day ceremony, and he told Denver7 it was “such a great honor” to stand there for friends who had died. The last man from Kojak’s squad room is still answering the call.
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