The Only ‘The Odd Couple’ Cast Members Still Alive Today

“Can two divorced men share an apartment without driving each other crazy?” That question, read over the opening credits of The Odd Couple for much of its early run, set up every episode that followed, and the answer was always a cheerful no. Neil Simon had first put Felix Unger and Oscar Madison on Broadway in 1965. Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau carried them into the 1968 film, and in the fall of 1970 ABC gave them a weekly home, with Tony Randall as the fussy photographer and Jack Klugman as the sportswriter who could live happily with any stain.

The first season was shot like a movie, with a laugh track and no audience, and both stars disliked it. ABC gave in for season two, and from then on the show was filmed with three cameras in front of a live studio crowd, which suited two actors who had learned their timing on the stage. It never cracked the Nielsen top 30, yet strong summer reruns kept it on the air for five seasons, and Randall and Klugman were nominated for Emmys every single year. Here is what became of the stars and the friends, wives and girlfriends around them, and who is still with us.

Is Tony Randall still alive?

Felix Unger was the man who cleared his sinuses with a honk and could not walk past a mess. Randall had already played the part on stage, so he arrived knowing every one of Felix’s tics. He won his Emmy for the role in 1975, the year the show ended.

He went on to The Tony Randall Show and Love, Sidney, but his real passion was the theater, and in 1991 he founded the National Actors Theatre in New York to stage classic plays at prices ordinary people could afford. His private life took a late turn, too. After his first wife, Florence, died in 1992, he married actress Heather Harlan in 1995, and he became a father for the first time at 77 when their daughter Julia was born in 1997. Their son Jefferson followed a year later.

Tony Randall died in his sleep at NYU Medical Center on May 17, 2004, at the age of 84. He had developed pneumonia after heart bypass surgery the previous December. The eulogy at his memorial was given by the man who knew him best.

Is Jack Klugman still alive?

Oscar Madison was the cigar-chomping slob who drove Felix to despair. Klugman had already replaced Matthau as Oscar on Broadway, and he won two Emmys for the TV role, in 1971 and 1973. A year after The Odd Couple wrapped, he became a whole new kind of hero as the crusading medical examiner on Quincy, M.E., which ran from 1976 to 1983.

Then his voice nearly left him for good. Throat cancer cost him a vocal cord in the late 1980s, and for a time he could barely speak above a whisper. “He was the first one to visit me in the hospital,” Klugman told J. The Jewish News of Northern California in 2005. “I couldn’t talk at all,” he told Hadassah Magazine a few months later, remembering that Randall promised him, “When you’re ready to go back to work, we’ll find you a venue.” In June 1991, Randall kept that promise with a one-night benefit performance of The Odd Couple for his new theater company at the Belasco Theatre. Klugman later wrote that “it was the most glorious night of my life.”

The two men went on to reunite for the 1993 TV movie The Odd Couple: Together Again and a Broadway revival of The Sunshine Boys in 1997. After Randall’s death, Klugman wrote a book about their friendship, Tony and Me, published in 2005. “I never had a chance to tell him how much he meant to me,” he told Hadassah. Jack Klugman died at his Los Angeles home on December 24, 2012, at 90. TMZ reported that his death certificate listed prostate cancer as the cause. The woman who had shared both of his lives, on screen and off, had gone five years before him.

Are Brett Somers and Janis Hansen still alive?

Oscar’s ex-wife Blanche was played by Brett Somers, who had been married to Klugman in real life since 1953. The casting gave their scenes an extra bite, and the couple quietly separated during the show’s final season. Somers found her own fame on Match Game, where from 1973 into the early 1980s she traded wisecracks with Charles Nelson Reilly from the top row of the panel. She died of stomach and colon cancer at her home in Westport, Connecticut, on September 15, 2007, at 83, according to her son, Adam Klugman.

Felix’s ex-wife Gloria, the woman he never stopped trying to win back, was played by Janis Hansen. She also played a nun in the 1970 disaster film Airport, and she later stepped behind the scenes and founded a talent management company in Los Angeles. Hansen died in Los Angeles on November 30, 2021, at 81. No cause of death was made public. Over at the poker table, meanwhile, the boys had their own regular in a police uniform.

Is Al Molinaro still alive?

Officer Murray Greshler was the gentle, slightly dim cop who came to the Friday night game and never quite figured out why Felix and Oscar fought so much. Al Molinaro got the part through producer Garry Marshall, and Marshall remembered him a few years later. In 1976 Molinaro took over the counter at Arnold’s on Happy Days, replacing Pat Morita, and he played Al Delvecchio there until 1982 before carrying the character into Joanie Loves Chachi. A whole new generation met him in 1994 in Weezer’s “Buddy Holly” music video.

“You’ve just got to be lucky and in the right place at the right time,” he said in 2004, looking back on an acting career that did not take off until he was about 50. Al Molinaro died in Glendale, California, in late October 2015, at 96. His son told the Kenosha News the cause was complications from a gallbladder infection. You can read about his Happy Days castmates in our look at that show’s surviving cast. Murray was not the only one at the card table with a long career ahead of him.

Are Garry Walberg and Larry Gelman still alive?

Homer “Speed” Deegan and Vinnie Barella filled out Oscar’s poker game. Garry Walberg, who played Speed, followed Klugman straight into his next hit, playing Lt. Frank Monahan in 145 episodes of Quincy, M.E.. Walberg died in Northridge, California, on March 27, 2012, at 90, from chronic lung disease and congestive heart failure.

Larry Gelman, who played Vinnie, was one of those faces viewers saw everywhere in the 1970s. He was Dr. Bernie Tupperman in Bob Newhart’s therapy group on The Bob Newhart Show, and he picked up an Emmy nomination for a guest role on Barney Miller. He died in Los Angeles on June 7, 2021, at 90, from injuries suffered in a fall. Ryan MacDonald, who played Roy in the first season’s poker games, went on to a long run in soaps, including Days of Our Lives, and died in Hollywood in February 2020 at 89. The real scene-stealer in Oscar’s world, though, sat at a desk in his office.

Is Penny Marshall still alive?

Myrna Turner was Oscar’s nasal, wisecracking secretary, and she was played by the producer’s little sister. Penny Marshall joined the show in its second season, after her brother Garry became its executive producer. In her final episode Myrna married her boyfriend Sheldn, played by Marshall’s real husband at the time, Rob Reiner. The missing letter was explained with a perfect deadpan: “they left the ‘o’ off the birth certificate.”

Myrna led straight to Laverne DeFazio on Laverne & Shirley, which ran from 1976 to 1983, and then Marshall moved behind the camera. Her 1988 film Big made her the first woman to direct a movie that earned more than $100 million at the U.S. box office, and A League of Their Own followed in 1992.

Penny Marshall died at her Los Angeles home on December 17, 2018, at 75, from complications of diabetes, her publicist told the Associated Press. We looked at the rest of her famous sitcom family in the surviving cast of Laverne & Shirley. Before Myrna arrived, Oscar had a different woman in his life, and she was a doctor.

Is Joan Hotchkis still alive?

Dr. Nancy Cunningham was Oscar’s girlfriend from late in the first season into the second. Joan Hotchkis had a writer’s mind as well as an actor’s. She wrote and starred in the 1975 film Legacy, based on her own one-woman play, and played Mama Hartley in Ode to Billy Joe in 1976. She co-wrote the acting manual No Acting Please and later toured her own performance pieces as far as the Edinburgh Fringe, where her show won a Fringe First Award.

“I knew acting was my medium,” she told the Los Angeles Times in 1991, remembering how early she had felt it. Hotchkis died in Los Angeles on September 27, 2022, at 95, after suffering from congestive heart failure. Her time on the show overlapped with two visitors from upstairs who nearly stole it.

Is Carole Shelley still alive?

Gwendolyn and Cecily Pigeon, the giggling English sisters who lived upstairs, were played by Carole Shelley and Monica Evans, who had originated the roles on Broadway and repeated them in the 1968 film before bringing them to four first-season episodes. They were close friends off screen, and they also voiced the gossiping Gabble geese in Disney’s The Aristocats in 1970. Evans left acting after voicing Maid Marian in Robin Hood in 1973, and the two reunited at the TCM Classic Film Festival in 2018.

Shelley’s career only grew. She won the 1979 Tony Award for Best Actress in a Play for The Elephant Man, and in 2003 she originated the role of the scheming headmistress Madame Morrible in Wicked on Broadway. Carole Shelley died of cancer at her home in Manhattan on August 31, 2018, at 79. Felix’s daughter and his girlfriend, meanwhile, are both still with us.

Is Pamelyn Ferdin still alive?

Edna Unger was Felix’s daughter, the girl he doted on and worried over, and she was first played by Pamelyn Ferdin. Her voice was even more famous than her face, because she was Lucy Van Pelt in the Peanuts specials and the 1969 film A Boy Named Charlie Brown. She also voiced Fern in Charlotte’s Web in 1973.

She left acting behind for a very different life. Ferdin graduated from nursing school in 1981 and went to work as a registered nurse, and from the 1990s she became a fierce animal rights activist who has been arrested for the cause. Born February 4, 1959, Pamelyn Ferdin is 67. In September 2026 she told Parade she is writing a memoir about her years as a child star. She still marvels that fans remember one 1971 guest spot on The Brady Bunch, and joked that “it has earned me the status of legend.” The last of our survivors was once brought to tears by Tony Randall, and what he did next made them friends for life.

Is Elinor Donahue still alive?

Miriam Welby was Felix’s sweet, patient girlfriend from the third season into the fifth, and she was supposed to appear only once. Elinor Donahue, already known to millions as Betty on Father Knows Best and Ellie on The Andy Griffith Show, was booked as Felix’s blind date for a single punchline. Randall named the character himself, and Miriam kept coming back.

Working with him was not always easy. In a 2006 interview with the Television Academy Foundation, as reported by Cheat Sheet, Donahue recalled a dress rehearsal where Randall shouted and pounded the table when she missed a cue, and she “had tears coming down my cheeks.” She was sure she would be fired. Instead, she found roses in her dressing room with a note that read, “I’m sorry I made you cry. You’re a wonderful Miriam, will you forgive me?” They were friends from that day on, she said, “just buddies, just chums.”

Donahue kept working for decades, including a role in Pretty Woman, before her last screen credit on The Young and the Restless in 2011. Born April 19, 1937, Elinor Donahue is 89 and happily retired. Her son Peter Ackerman shared an update on her this summer. “She’s retired and unless they’re fans of classic TV, they don’t engage,” he told Woman’s World in June. These days, he said, she enjoys “just being Elinor.”