The ‘Family Ties’ Cast Members Still Alive Today, 44 Years After The Keatons Moved In

Johnny Mathis and Deniece Williams sang “Without Us” over the opening credits, and for seven seasons that soft duet meant it was time to visit the Keatons of Columbus, Ohio. Family Ties premiered on NBC on September 22, 1982, sold to the network on a four-word pitch, hip parents and square kids. Steven and Elyse were former flower children who still believed in protest marches, and their oldest son Alex was a proud Young Republican who wanted to be rich.

The show ran 176 episodes before signing off on May 14, 1989, but it took a while to catch on. “We weren’t really a top ten show until they put us behind Cosby on Thursday night,” Michael Gross told Fox News on the 40th anniversary. Forty-four years after the Keatons first came home, we checked on every member of the Family Ties cast this week. The good news is better than you might expect, but the show has lost two people who shaped it, and their stories come first.

Is Gary David Goldberg still alive?

Every Family Ties episode ended with a dog. Ubu Productions was named for the Labrador owned by creator Gary David Goldberg, a Brooklyn postal worker’s son who drew the Keatons partly from his own life as a 1960s idealist raising kids in the Reagan years. Goldberg had doubts about Michael J. Fox at first, and NBC president Brandon Tartikoff had far bigger ones. “I love the show, you’ve just got to get rid of the kid. I can’t see that face on a lunchbox,” Tartikoff told him, according to Mental Floss.

Goldberg kept the kid, and after Back to the Future made Fox a movie star, Fox sent Tartikoff a lunchbox with his own face on it. The note read “This is for you to put your crow in.” Tartikoff kept it in his office, and he died of Hodgkin lymphoma on August 27, 1997, at 48. Goldberg later co-created Spin City for Fox in 1996. He died of a brain tumor in Montecito, California, on June 22, 2013, at 68, three days before his 69th birthday. The other loss came much earlier, and it involved a teenager who spent one week playing a math genius.

Is River Phoenix still alive?

In the fourth season episode “My Tutor,” which aired November 14, 1985, Alex is drowning in advanced geometry and gets help from Eugene Forbes, a boy genius who promptly falls for Jennifer. The young actor playing Eugene was River Phoenix, and Fox noticed right away. “Look at this kid working,” Fox later recalled in an interview with The Independent, as reported by NME. “This kid is taking this 10 ways from Sunday and he is really coming at it.”

Phoenix became one of the most admired young actors of his generation, with Stand By Me, Running on Empty and an Oscar nomination still ahead of him. Fox said Phoenix was always kind to him after he became a star, and he credited a pep talk he gave the teenager on the Family Ties set. Phoenix died outside the Viper Room in West Hollywood on October 31, 1993, from acute multiple drug intoxication. He was 23. With those losses behind us, the rest of this story is about the people still here, starting with Mallory’s leather-jacketed boyfriend.

Is Scott Valentine still alive?

Nick Moore was supposed to be a one-episode joke, a grunting artist who barely needed dialogue. Scott Valentine turned him into a fixture from season four through the finale, and NBC tried three different spin-offs. The last, The Art of Being Nick, aired once on August 27, 1987, with Julia Louis-Dreyfus in the cast.

Scott Valentine is alive and 68, and he walked away from acting on his own terms. “I got sick of Hollywood, and I left in ’04. I became an investment banker,” he told Hello! in September 2026. He moved back to his hometown of Saratoga Springs, New York, where he works with the investment firm Excelsior Capital Partners. When he helped pull the cast together for a 2020 charity reunion on Zoom, he told Saratoga Living, “Literally, everyone from the cast are all just good people.” One of those good people was the boy next door who never stopped hoping Mallory would notice him.

Is Marc Price still alive?

Irwin “Skippy” Handelman spent seven seasons next door, carrying a hopeless torch for Mallory. Marc Price came by the comic timing honestly, because his father was Borscht Belt comedian Al Bernie. From 1989 to 1992 he hosted Teen Win, Lose or Draw on The Disney Channel.

Marc Price is alive and 58. He followed his father into stand-up and spent more than 15 years as a regular at Harrah’s Las Vegas. He has also toured with the Sitcom Legends show alongside Marsha Warfield of Night Court and Jimmie Walker of Good Times, and he still mines his Hollywood childhood for material. Alex, meanwhile, had a new girlfriend in the final two seasons, and she was about to become a much bigger star.

Is Courteney Cox still alive?

When Lauren Miller arrived in 1987, she was a fellow student who could match Alex argument for argument. Courteney Cox was best known then as the young woman Bruce Springsteen pulled onstage in the 1984 “Dancing in the Dark” video, and Lauren stayed through the 1989 finale. Five years later she was Monica Geller on Friends, which ran for ten seasons on the same network.

Courteney Cox is alive and 62, and she is still working at full speed. She returned as reporter Gale Weathers in Scream 7, which opened in February 2026. According to Variety, that makes her the only actor besides the voice of Ghostface to appear in every Scream movie. The youngest Keaton, by contrast, left Hollywood behind before he was a teenager.

Is Brian Bonsall still alive?

Elyse gave birth to Andrew during season three, and by season five the baby had grown into a pint-size conservative who idolized Alex. Brian Bonsall was cast at four, according to Entertainment Weekly, and he won three Young Artist Awards for playing Andy. He later played Worf’s son Alexander on Star Trek: The Next Generation. In 1995 he quit acting and moved to Boulder, Colorado, with his mother and stepfather.

Music became his life, and so did some hard years. Bonsall was arrested several times in Colorado between 2007 and 2010, beginning with an assault charge involving a girlfriend. “We were two crazy, drunk punkers trying to outdo each other and be wasted all the time,” he told Entertainment Weekly in 2025, explaining how that relationship went wrong. Brian Bonsall is alive and 44. He married Courtney Tuck in 2017 and their son Oliver was born in 2019. He has spent years playing guitar in punk bands, including a run with The Ataris. His TV sister Jennifer took a very different road out of the spotlight.

Is Tina Yothers still alive?

Jennifer Keaton was the sharp-tongued kid who saw through everyone, and Tina Yothers had been acting since she was three. She was a working musician before she could drive, releasing “Baby, I’m Back in Love Again” at 13 and singing on Family Ties on February 26, 1987.

Tina Yothers is alive and 53. She married Robert Kaiser in 2002, and they raised a blended family in Ontario, California, about 35 miles east of Los Angeles, according to Hello! in March 2026. We have looked at how Tina Yothers looks now, and she has kept her life private by choice. Alex’s first great love, on the other hand, ended up with a lifetime role opposite him.

Is Tracy Pollan still alive?

Ellen Reed was an artsy, opinionated student who had no patience for Alex’s politics, and Tracy Pollan played her for most of season four. Their chemistry did not start off warm. “I think I thought he was kind of full of himself,” she said of Fox, according to Mental Floss. She left the show after one season, and the two reconnected while making Bright Lights, Big City. They married on July 16, 1988, at the West Mountain Inn in Arlington, Vermont.

Tracy Pollan is alive and 66. She earned an Emmy nomination for Law & Order: Special Victims Unit in 2000 and has written two cookbooks with her mother and sisters. “Anything good that we do comes from her,” Fox told People in 2022. In September 2026 she walked the Emmys red carpet on her own, Just Jared reported, on the night her husband was honored. We wrote this week about their four grown children. Mallory, meanwhile, grew up into the most outspoken Keaton of them all.

Is Justine Bateman still alive?

Mallory Keaton cared about shopping and boys, and Justine Bateman played her as sweeter and smarter than the jokes allowed. She was on the show from the first episode to the last, and she hosted Saturday Night Live during its 13th season.

The second act surprised everyone. Bateman earned a computer science degree from UCLA in 2016. In 2021 she published the book Face: One Square Foot of Skin and premiered her first feature as a director, Violet, at SXSW. She has refused cosmetic surgery, and she was blunt about it on 60 Minutes Australia in 2023. “I think I look rad,” she said, according to the Los Angeles Times. “I think my face represents who I am. I like it.” Justine Bateman is alive and 60, a birthday she marked in February 2026. Her TV parents share something even rarer than a sitcom marriage.

Is Meredith Baxter still alive?

Meredith Baxter grew up around sitcoms, because her mother was Whitney Blake, the Mrs. Baxter of Hazel. She had already starred in Bridget Loves Bernie and Family when she became Elyse, the architect and former flower child at the center of the family. Looking back on the cast, she told Fox News, “We learned to really love each other and recognize each other’s strengths.”

After the show, she became the queen of the true-crime TV movie and earned an Emmy nomination for A Woman Scorned: The Betty Broderick Story in 1992. Her 2011 memoir Untied told of hard marriages and her recovery from alcoholism, and of realizing she was gay, and it became a New York Times bestseller. Meredith Baxter is alive and 79, and she turned 79 on the very same day as the man who played her husband.

Is Michael Gross still alive?

Michael Gross and Meredith Baxter were both born on June 21, 1947, on opposite sides of the country, and neither has ever let the other forget it. On their 79th birthday this June, Gross posted a photo of himself kissing her cheek, as The List reported. “We love working together. We adore each other,” he told Entertainment Tonight in 2022.

The bearded Steven Keaton led to the role Gross has played longest. He became gun-loving survivalist Burt Gummer in Tremors in 1990 and kept him going for 30 years through Tremors: Shrieker Island in 2020, the only actor in every film and the TV series. Michael Gross is alive and 79. He has been married to casting director Elza Bergeron since 1984, and he is a serious railroad buff. That leaves the kid NBC nearly fired.

Is Michael J. Fox still alive?

Alex P. Keaton won Michael J. Fox three straight Emmys, and in 1985 he shot Family Ties by day and Back to the Future by night. Gross saw the fame land up close. “Michael knew he was important, he knew that he had struck gold, but nothing changed,” he told Entertainment Tonight. “Michael never forgot where he came from.”

Fox was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in 1991 and went public in 1998, two years before he launched the Michael J. Fox Foundation. He retired from acting in 2020 but came back for the third season of Shrinking. In October 2025 he published Future Boy, a memoir of his Back to the Future year. Michael J. Fox is alive and 65. This year Canada promoted him to Companion of the Order of Canada, CBC News reported in June, and the Television Academy gave him the Bob Hope Humanitarian Award at the Emmys in September. The kid with the wrong face for a lunchbox is still the one everybody remembers, and the whole Keaton family is still here to remember him.