The Only ‘Room 222’ Cast Members Still Alive Today

Jerry Goldsmith wrote the theme for Room 222 mostly in 7/4 time, which is why that bouncy little tune never quite lands where your foot expects it to. It played over shots of the real Los Angeles High School every week from September 17, 1969, until ABC pulled the show in the middle of its fifth season on January 11, 1974, after 112 aired episodes. In between, a half-hour show about one history class at the fictional Walt Whitman High talked about racism, Vietnam, drugs, dropouts and teen pregnancy at a time when most sitcoms were still about talking horses and genies.

It nearly didn’t survive its first year. The ratings were weak and ABC was ready to cancel it, until the 1970 Emmys handed Room 222 the award for Outstanding New Series plus acting trophies for two of its stars, and the network changed its mind. More than five decades after the last bell, here is what became of the teachers and students of Room 222, starting with the cast members we have lost and ending with the ones who are still with us.

Is Lloyd Haynes still alive?

Pete Dixon was the reason the show worked. Lloyd Haynes played him as a calm, patient history teacher who could defuse almost anything with a question, and he did it as one of the very few Black leading men on network television in 1969. Haynes came to acting late. He was a Marine Corps veteran from South Bend, Indiana, and before Room 222 he had a small piece of television history as communications officer Alden in the second Star Trek pilot, “Where No Man Has Gone Before,” a part that went away when the series went into production.

The cast stayed close long after the cancellation, which came as a surprise to all of them. “ABC did have the kindness to come and tell us before we read it in the papers,” Karen Valentine told Fox News in 2019. Haynes kept working steadily in films such as The Greatest and Good Guys Wear Black and in guest spots on shows like Emergency! and Hotel. By the mid-1980s he had joined General Hospital as Mayor Ken Morgan.

He was still playing that role when he became ill, and he kept making the drive from his home in Coronado, California, to the studio in Hollywood. Lloyd Haynes died of lung cancer on December 31, 1986, at the age of 52, as both his Wikipedia biography and Looper report. He was the first of the show’s four stars to go, and the youngest by far.

Is Patsy Garrett still alive?

Every high school has a front office, and at Walt Whitman it belonged to Miss Hogarth, Principal Kaufman’s secretary. Patsy Garrett played her in a dozen episodes, and by then she had already been in show business for most of her life. She had her own children’s radio show in Richmond, Virginia, at age seven and spent years as a comic singer on Fred Waring’s national radio program in the late 1930s and 1940s.

Television viewers in the ’70s knew her face even if they didn’t know her name. She played the nosy neighbor Mrs. Fowler on Nanny and the Professor and Mary in the Benji movies, and she danced the “chow-chow-chow” with a cat in those Purina Cat Chow commercials. Patsy Garrett died on January 8, 2015, after a brief illness. She was 93.

Is Michael Constantine still alive?

Seymour Kaufman was the principal every teacher secretly wanted: harried and sarcastic, but always on the right side in the end. Michael Constantine, born Gus Efstratiou in Reading, Pennsylvania, to Greek immigrant parents, won the 1970 Emmy for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Comedy Series for the part and was nominated again the following year. Before Room 222 he had been a stage actor who understudied Paul Muni in Inherit the Wind, and he had a small but memorable role opposite Paul Newman in The Hustler.

After the show he starred in his own sitcom, Sirota’s Court, as a night court judge in 1976 and picked up a Golden Globe nomination. He played Santa Claus in Prancer in 1989. Then, in his mid-70s, he became famous all over again as Gus Portokalos, the Windex-loving father in My Big Fat Greek Wedding, and he reprised the role in the 2016 sequel.

Michael Constantine died at his home in Reading on August 31, 2021, at the age of 94, of natural causes, as NBC News and Fox News reported at the time. His on-screen daughter Nia Vardalos called him “the dad to our cast-family, a gift to the written word, and always a friend,” and she dedicated My Big Fat Greek Wedding 3 to his memory. The rest of this story belongs to the cast members who are still here.

Is Ta-Tanisha still alive?

Pam Simpson was the popular girl in Mr. Dixon’s class, and Ta-Tanisha, born Shirley Cummings in the Bronx, played her from 1970 to 1972. She had come out of the Performing Arts Society of Los Angeles, and she went from Room 222 to a small part in The Sting and a run of ’70s sitcom roles, including tenant Janet Lawrence at the Sanford Arms on Sanford and Son and three different characters on Good Times.

Her life off camera became a Hollywood love story. She married character actor Lee Weaver in 1971, and they stayed together until his death on September 22, 2025, at age 95. Obituaries in Primetimer and other outlets described her as his wife of 54 years and named their daughter, Leis, among his survivors.

So yes, Ta-Tanisha is alive. Born January 15, 1953, she is 73 years old today.

Is Judy Strangis still alive?

Helen Loomis was the quiet kid, and Judy Strangis played her in 70 episodes, which made her one of the most familiar faces in the classroom. Show business ran in her family. Her uncle was the bandleader Spike Jones, and her brother Sam became a television producer and studio executive. She made her film debut at seven in 1957 and had guest roles on Bewitched, The Twilight Zone and Batman before Room 222 opened its door.

“Everybody wanted to be on Batman, so I think I did it just to have fun,” she said in a 2024 YouTube interview quoted by ReMIND Magazine. Saturday morning made her a hero of her own in 1976, when she played the sidekick Dyna Girl opposite Deidre Hall in Electra Woman and Dyna Girl. Around the same time she was Chrysler’s “Mean Mary Jean” in Plymouth ads, and she spent the next decade voicing cartoons such as Goldie Gold and Action Jack.

Her last screen work came in 1994, and she married Jayson Sher in 1987. She has kept a low profile since, though ReMIND reports she still turns up at fan events now and then and was photographed with Deidre Hall at a 2024 Hollywood Show. Judy Strangis was born December 23, 1949, and she is 76.

Is Eric Laneuville still alive?

Larry was a semi-regular in the back of the room from 1970 to 1973, and the teenager who played him had one of the most surprising careers of anyone on the show. Eric Laneuville was a drama student at Dorsey High School when he joined the cast. One of his episodes put him opposite Chuck Norris, who later cast him as his adopted son in the 1979 film A Force of One.

Most viewers remember him as orderly Luther Hawkins on St. Elsewhere from 1982 to 1988. That show also gave him his start behind the camera in 1984, and directing soon became his main career. He won an Emmy in 1992 for an episode of I’ll Fly Away and has since directed episodes of NYPD Blue, ER, Lost, Blue Bloods and dozens of other dramas. The Directors Guild of America lists him as a member since 1984 and one of the interviewers for its Visual History project.

Eric Laneuville was born July 14, 1952, and he is 74.

Is Denise Nicholas still alive?

Liz McIntyre was the school’s guidance counselor and Pete Dixon’s girlfriend, and Denise Nicholas earned three straight Golden Globe nominations for the role from 1970 to 1972. She came to it from the stage. She had spent two years touring the Deep South with the Free Southern Theater during the civil rights movement and was working with the Negro Ensemble Company in New York when the producers found her. “The screen testing was rigorous and challenging but it fell right in line with the trajectory I was on,” she told 50BOLD in a 2017 interview.

After Room 222 she starred with Sidney Poitier and Bill Cosby in Let’s Do It Again and was briefly married to Bill Withers, who recorded her song “Can We Pretend.” A whole new audience met her as Councilwoman Harriet DeLong on In the Heat of the Night from 1989 to 1995, and she wrote six episodes of that series, too. We covered which ‘In the Heat of the Night’ stars are still alive earlier this month.

Writing became her second career. “My secret ambition was to write. It took me a long time to get there, but I made it,” she told 50BOLD. Her debut novel, Freshwater Road, won the Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Award in 2006. In November 2025 Agate published her memoir, Finding Home, which centers on the unsolved 1980 killing of her younger sister Michele, and she has been talking about it on KUT’s In Black America and other programs into 2026. Denise Nicholas was born July 12, 1944, and she is 82.

Is Karen Valentine still alive?

Alice Johnson walked into the show as a nervous student teacher, and the actress who played her nearly fumbled the audition. Director Gene Reynolds saw her stumbling and realized she was funny, and that is how Karen Valentine, a former Miss Sonoma County who had once lip-synced on The Ed Sullivan Show, got the part. In 1970, in her first season, she won the Emmy for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series.

“It was kind of mind-blowing to have that happen so soon, so quickly,” she told Fox News. Carol Burnett congratulated her that night, and Valentine still sounded amazed decades later: “But that Carol Burnett would know me? Just incredible.” She went on to her own sitcom, Karen, in 1975, traded quips with Paul Lynde as a semi-regular on The Hollywood Squares through the ’70s, and starred in Disney’s Hot Lead and Cold Feet and The North Avenue Irregulars. That second film reunited her with her old principal, Michael Constantine.

She has worked mostly on stage since, in Romantic Comedy on Broadway and on tour and in a Los Angeles production of Steel Magnolias. Her last screen role was a 2004 Hallmark movie, Wedding Daze, with John Larroquette. ReMIND caught up with her at the Chiller Theater convention in 2024, and we marked her 79th birthday in May.

Karen Valentine was born May 25, 1947, and she is 79 today. When Fox News asked what Room 222 meant to her, she called it a first job so special and groundbreaking that “it also kind of spoiled me, because it set the bar really high.” Then she asked the question every fan of that classroom has asked since 1974: “How do you top that?”