Who Is Still Alive From ‘The Mod Squad’ Main Cast?

When Earle Hagen’s restless theme music kicked in on ABC on Tuesday, September 24, 1968, viewers met three young outcasts who had been handed a deal no cop show had offered before. Pete, Linc and Julie could go to jail, or they could work undercover for the police with no guns and no badges, slipping in among the kids and crooks that no square detective could ever get near. The promos boiled it down to “One white, one black, one blonde,” and for five seasons and more than 120 episodes, The Mod Squad put the hippie generation on the side of the law.

Bud Ruskin created the series, and Aaron Spelling and Danny Thomas produced it. It earned six Emmy nominations and four Golden Globe nominations, and the whole original cast came back for a reunion movie in 1979. The squad has now been reunited in a sadder way, because none of the show’s four main stars is still alive. The last of them died in December 2024, and the Mod Squad cast members below appear in the order we lost them, so the one who outlived them all comes last.

Is Tige Andrews Still Alive?

The first loss among the people who built the show came behind the camera. Aaron Spelling, the producer who went on to Charlie’s Angels, The Love Boat and Dynasty, died on June 23, 2006, at 83, from complications of a stroke, according to CBS News and his Wikipedia biography. Seven months later, the man who played the squad’s boss was gone too.

Tige Andrews was Capt. Adam Greer, the gruff but fair officer who talked three troubled kids into becoming cops. He was about two decades older than his young co-stars, and he brought a long résumé with him. Born Tiger Androwas in Brooklyn on March 19, 1920, he was in the 1948 Broadway cast of Mister Roberts and repeated his role in the 1955 film. UPI credited him with introducing “Mack the Knife” in the original off-Broadway production of The Threepenny Opera.

Television knew him well before Greer. He played Pvt. Gander on The Phil Silvers Show and Lt. John Russo on The Detectives, and Star Trek fans remember him as Kras, only the second Klingon ever to face Captain Kirk, in the episode “Friday’s Child.” Greer was the role that stuck, though, and it earned him a 1970 Emmy nomination for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Drama Series.

Andrews was married to ballerina Norma Thornton from 1950 until her death in 1996. He died on January 27, 2007, at his home in Encino, California, at 86, and he was survived by six children and 11 grandchildren, according to UPI and the Los Angeles Times. Twelve years would pass before the squad lost its first young member.

Is Peggy Lipton Still Alive?

Julie Barnes was the quiet heart of the trio, a runaway who had fled her mother’s home in San Francisco and been picked up for vagrancy. Peggy Lipton, born in New York City on August 30, 1946, played her with a fragile calm that critic David Hutchings once compared to “a canary with a broken wing.” The role won her the Golden Globe for Best Actress in a Television Drama, and it made her one of the most famous young women in America.

She did not enjoy that part. “Fame really drove me into my house. I was very paranoid,” Lipton told the Los Angeles Times in 1993. “I had no idea how to be comfortable with the press.” In 1974 she married music producer Quincy Jones and stepped away from acting to raise their daughters, Kidada and Rashida. In her 2005 memoir, Breathing Out, she wrote about the racist backlash the interracial couple faced, including from her own mother. The couple divorced in 1990 and stayed close.

That same year, David Lynch brought her back as Norma Jennings, the owner of the Double R Diner on Twin Peaks. “It was very scary,” she admitted. “I had become so insulated in my world as a mother.” She returned to Norma in the 1992 film Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me and again in the 2017 revival.

Lipton was diagnosed with colon cancer in 2004. She died in Los Angeles on May 11, 2019, at 72. “She made her journey peacefully with her daughters and nieces by her side,” Kidada and Rashida said in a statement reported by the Associated Press. “We feel so lucky for every moment we spent with her.” Two years later, the same disease took her Mod Squad partner.

Is Clarence Williams III Still Alive?

Linc Hayes, one of 13 children, had been arrested during the Watts riots, and with his Afro and dark glasses he became one of the coolest men on television. Clarence Williams III, born in Manhattan on August 21, 1939, came to the part from the New York stage, where he earned a 1964 Tony nomination for Slow Dance on the Killing Ground. According to the Associated Press, it was Bill Cosby who recommended him to Aaron Spelling.

In 1967 Williams married stage actress Gloria Foster, who appeared twice on The Mod Squad and later played the Oracle in The Matrix. They divorced in 1984 but remained friends until her death in 2001.

After the show, Williams built a career out of characters you could not take your eyes off. He played Prince’s tormented father in Purple Rain in 1984, and in 1990 he joined Peggy Lipton on Twin Peaks as FBI Agent Roger Hardy, which put two members of the squad in Lynch’s strange little town at once. Director Lee Daniels later cast him in The Butler. Williams was matter of fact about all that fame. “All most people know about me is the two hours they’ve invested in a movie theater or the time spent in front of their TV,” he said in a 1999 interview quoted by the Associated Press. “It’s nice to be recognized, and I have no problem with it at all.”

Williams died at his Los Angeles home on June 4, 2021, at 81, after a battle with colon cancer, his manager Allan Mindel said. Director Peyton Reed wrote that he had “grown up watching him as Linc in ‘The Mod Squad’ and thought he was the epitome of cool,” and Lee Daniels called him “An extraordinary actor. Revolutionary. Ahead of his time.” That left one member of the squad.

Is Michael Cole Still Alive?

Pete Cochran was the rich kid gone wrong, thrown out of his family’s Beverly Hills home and arrested for stealing a car. Michael Cole, born in Madison, Wisconsin, on July 3, 1940, almost refused to play him. He told Aaron Spelling the show “sounds stupid, and I hope it never gets on the air,” he later wrote, according to Fox News. “I didn’t want to play some guy who ratted on some other troubled kids.”

Spelling won him over by telling him “the bottom line of the show is about caring,” Cole recalled to Boomer Magazine on the show’s 50th anniversary in 2018. He said that caring was never an act. “Our friendship and caring was real, and that came across on the screen,” he explained. “None of us had much of a family background, but we had each other, so that was realistic, too.”

Life after the squad was rocky. Cole kept working, with guest spots on Wonder Woman, The Love Boat, CHiPs and Murder, She Wrote, and he gave a generation of horror fans nightmares as the grown-up bully Henry Bowers in the 1990 miniseries It. He later played Harlan Barrett on General Hospital. Offscreen, he fought alcoholism for years. “I was in jail for being drunk, fighting, crap like that,” he told Boomer Magazine, and by 1993 “I was tired of being drunk and hurting people.” He credited his third wife, Shelley Funes, with helping him get sober, and he stayed that way. His memoir, I Played the White Guy, poked fun at the show’s famous tagline.

Cole died on December 10, 2024, at Providence Cedars-Sinai Tarzana Medical Center in California, at 84, as we reported at the time. No cause of death was released. His representatives said he died “peacefully this morning, surrounded by loved ones, after living a full and vibrant life,” according to Variety and Fox News. He was survived by his wife, Shelley.

Who Carries On For ‘The Mod Squad’ Cast Today?

The squad got one last case together in The Return of the Mod Squad, which aired on ABC on May 18, 1979, with all four original stars back in their old roles. Twenty years later, MGM handed the parts to Claire Danes, Giovanni Ribisi and Omar Epps for a big-screen Mod Squad, but the movie never caught on, and for most of us Pete, Linc and Julie still belong to the originals.

The closest living link to the show is Peggy Lipton’s family. Her daughters, Kidada and Rashida Jones, both became actresses, and Rashida found a way to work with her mother late in her life. On the TBS comedy Angie Tribeca, Lipton played Peggy Tribeca, the mother of Rashida’s title character, and the two shared the screen in the 2017 season finale, as TV Insider noted at the time.

Rashida gave birth to her son only months before her mother died, and she has been open about how those two events collided. “I was in grief-shock,” she told NPR’s Fresh Air in 2021. “It’s very binary, both things, becoming a mother and losing my mother, like, there’s my life before and there’s my life after.” It is a fitting thought for a show about three kids who never had much family until they found one in each other.