The Only ‘Silver Spoons’ Cast Members Still Alive Today

Every kid who watched NBC on Saturday nights in 1982 wanted the same thing, and it was not the money. It was the train. In Silver Spoons, young Ricky Stratton shows up at the Long Island mansion of the father he has never met and finds a house built for fun, with arcade games and a scale-model freight train big enough to ride from room to room. His father, toy company heir Edward Stratton III, turns out to be the bigger kid of the two, and the whole show grew out of that one swap: a boy who wanted his dad to grow up and a dad who wanted his boy to loosen up.

Silver Spoons premiered on September 25, 1982, and ran four seasons on NBC before moving to first-run syndication for a fifth, signing off on May 30, 1987, after 116 episodes. Ron Dante sang the original theme, “Together.” Forty-four years after that first ride through the mansion, some of the faces from the Stratton house are gone and some are busier than ever, so here is where every main member of the family stands today.

Is John Houseman still alive?

The grandest presence in the mansion belonged to Grandfather Edward Stratton II, the stern old industrialist who never understood why his son played with toys for a living. John Houseman played him on and off for the entire run, and by the time he arrived he already had one of the most remarkable résumés in show business. Born Jacques Haussmann in Bucharest on September 22, 1902, he founded the Mercury Theatre with Orson Welles in 1937 and helped produce the famous 1938 “War of the Worlds” radio broadcast.

Acting came late. Houseman won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor for The Paper Chase in 1973, playing the frightening law professor Charles W. Kingsfield, and then became a household voice in Smith Barney commercials, announcing that the firm made money “the old fashioned way… they earn it.” Ricky Schroder remembered him fondly. “He was very, very old when I worked with him, and, I mean, he was a nice old guy,” Schroder told Bullz-Eye in 2010, adding that he “use to feel a little bit sorry for him, because your memory’s not as strong the older you get.”

Sadly, no. Houseman worked almost to the end, and his last film cameos in The Naked Gun and Scrooged reached theaters after he was gone. He died of spinal cancer at his home in Malibu on October 31, 1988, at 86, as the Deseret News and other papers reported that week. One of the young actors he had once pushed toward the stage was already part of the Stratton household.

Is Franklyn Seales still alive?

In the first season, Edward’s legal and business affairs went through attorney Leonard Rollins, played by Leonard Lightfoot. From season two on, that job belonged to Dexter Stuffins, the dry, buttoned-up business manager who spent most of his days trying to keep Edward from spending the company into the ground. Franklyn Seales played Dexter in 89 episodes, and the man who had opened the door to his career was the same John Houseman who played Grandpa.

Seales was born on July 15, 1952, in Calliaqua on the island of St. Vincent. In the early 1970s, according to a 2012 Daily News account of his life, he tagged along to a friend’s audition at Juilliard and ran the Romeo and Juliet balcony scene with her. Houseman, who ran the school’s drama division, noticed him instead and offered him a four-year scholarship. Seales went on to play Lt. Henry O. Flipper in the PBS drama The Trial of the Moke and the convicted killer Jimmy Lee Smith in The Onion Field before Dexter made him a familiar face.

No. After Silver Spoons ended he returned to the stage, and his last major role came in Nothing Sacred at the Mark Taper Forum in 1988. He died of complications from AIDS on May 14, 1990, at his family’s home in Brooklyn. He was 37, and the Los Angeles Times ran his obituary the next day under the headline “Stage Actor Seales Dies of AIDS at 37.” In season four the mansion gained another older relative, and this one came from Mars.

Is Ray Walston still alive?

Kate’s Uncle Harry Summers turned up in the 1985 season, and anyone who grew up in the 1960s knew the face at once. Ray Walston had spent three years as Uncle Martin on My Favorite Martian, and he had already won a Tony in 1956 as the devil, Mr. Applegate, in Damn Yankees. Teenagers in 1982 knew him as a different kind of menace, the unbending history teacher Mr. Hand in Fast Times at Ridgemont High.

His best work arguably came after Silver Spoons. As Judge Henry Bone on Picket Fences, Walston won back-to-back Emmys for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Drama Series in 1995 and 1996, in his 80s.

No. Walston had been living with lupus since 1994, and he died at his home in Beverly Hills on January 1, 2001, at 86. Those three are the members of the Stratton household we have lost. The rest of the family is still here, starting with the boy who was trouble from the very first season.

Is Jason Bateman still alive?

Ricky needed a friend with an edge, and he got one in Derek Taylor, the wisecracking schoolmate who was always one bad idea ahead of everybody else. Jason Bateman played Derek for the first two seasons, fresh off a stint as the orphan James on Little House on the Prairie. He was 13 when the show premiered, and life on the lot sounded a lot like the show. “We’d ride our bikes around the lot for exercise,” he told GQ in 2013. One of those rides, he later said on Jimmy Kimmel Live, nearly ended with him running into Michael Jackson, who turned out to be “a fan of the show and a fan of the ‘Ricker.'”

Derek was popular enough that NBC gave Bateman his own sitcom, It’s Your Move, in the fall of 1984. It lasted only until February, but Valerie, later renamed The Hogan Family, made him a teen idol, and at 18 he directed episodes of it. Then came a long dry spell before Arrested Development brought him a Golden Globe as Michael Bluth and Ozark brought him an Emmy for directing in 2019.

Yes. Bateman was born on January 14, 1969, which makes him 57, and he has never been busier. He co-hosts the SmartLess podcast with Will Arnett and Sean Hayes, and this year he earned four Emmy nominations, for acting in and directing Netflix’s Black Rabbit and for starring in and producing HBO’s DTF St. Louis, as NPR and TVLine reported in July. When Derek left the mansion, a Broadway kid moved in to take his place.

Is Alfonso Ribeiro still alive?

Alfonso Spears arrived in the third season as Ricky’s new best friend, and Alfonso Ribeiro brought along a set of dancing feet nobody else in the cast could match. He had already starred in the title role of The Tap Dance Kid on Broadway, and in 1984 he danced in a Pepsi commercial with Michael Jackson. “I was a huge fan and ended up becoming friends with him,” he told Closer Weekly in 2024.

Six years later he became Carlton Banks on The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, and the Carlton dance followed him everywhere. He has been honest about the price. “Playing Carlton on ‘Fresh Prince’ became a sacrifice,” he said in that same 2024 interview, as Fox News reported, because “people couldn’t see me as anything else.” The door that closed on acting opened onto hosting. He won Dancing with the Stars in 2014, took over America’s Funniest Home Videos in 2015 and moved up to host the dance show in 2022.

Yes. Ribeiro was born on September 21, 1971, so he is 55, and this fall he is co-hosting season 35 of Dancing with the Stars with Julianne Hough on ABC. “I’m enjoying being a host and am very happy with it,” he said. The woman who kept the whole Stratton house in order has been just as hard to slow down.

Is Erin Gray still alive?

Kate Summers was Edward’s assistant, his conscience and eventually his wife, after an on-again, off-again romance that ended in a third-season wedding. Erin Gray played her in all 116 episodes, and she came to the mansion straight from outer space. Before Silver Spoons she was Colonel Wilma Deering on Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, and before that she was one of the most in-demand TV commercial models in America.

The cast still talks about her. When they reunited on TODAY in 2013, Gray called the show “the best five years of my life,” and added, “Loved them at the beginning; loved them at the end.” Schroder confessed on the same broadcast that he had a serious crush on his TV stepmother. “Well, she got into yoga, it wasn’t fair!” he said, as TODAY reported. “She stretched on stage. And tennis! We played tennis, remember? Those skirts!”

Yes. Gray was born in Honolulu on January 7, 1950, and she is 76. She runs Heroes for Hire, which books science fiction stars for conventions and charity events, and she teaches tai chi. Last December she mourned her Buck Rogers co-star Gil Gerard, writing that he “was an important part of my life for over 52 years,” as Parade reported. We looked at how she quietly stepped away from Hollywood earlier this year. Her on-screen husband took an even quieter road.

Is Joel Higgins still alive?

Edward Stratton III was the heart of the joke and the heart of the show, a grown man who ran a toy company, did a little dance to the Pac-Man theme and slowly learned to be a father. Joel Higgins played him from the first episode to the last. He came to Hollywood from Broadway, where he won a Theatre World Award in 1975 for Shenandoah, and he had already headlined two short-lived series, Salvage 1 and Best of the West.

Music was always his other career. Higgins has written more than 100 commercial jingles and wrote the theme song for Lucille Ball’s Life with Lucy. After Silver Spoons he went back to the stage, starring on Broadway in City of Angels in 1991 and co-writing and directing Johnny Guitar, which won the Outer Critics Circle Award for best musical in 2004. In 2017 he released an EP of original songs, A World Away, under his full name, Joel Franklin Higgins.

Yes. Higgins was born in Bloomington, Illinois, on September 28, 1943, and he turned 83 this fall. He has kept a low profile for years, and Schroder said as much back in 2010. “Joel’s back on the east coast, and everybody’s, y’know, in their own lives,” he told Bullz-Eye. That leaves the boy who started it all.

Is Ricky Schroder still alive?

Ricky Schroder was already famous before he ever climbed aboard that train. His first film, The Champ in 1979, made him the youngest winner of a Golden Globe at the time, and Silver Spoons made him a weekly TV star. As an adult he dropped the “y,” and Rick Schroder built a second career in drama, from Lonesome Dove in 1989 to Detective Danny Sorenson on NYPD Blue from 1998 to 2001. He later moved behind the camera, producing military documentaries such as The Fighting Season.

He has been in the news this year for a social media post. After Dolly Parton died in August, Schroder, who played her father in two TV movies, wrote, “Thank you for choosing me Dolly to be your Movie Daddy,” but the same post criticized her positions on transgender rights and COVID vaccines, and the backlash was loud, as TV Insider reported.

Yes. Schroder was born in Brooklyn on April 13, 1970, and he is 56. The show still follows him everywhere he goes, and one question comes up more than any other. “And everybody asks about the train. Everybody!” he told Bullz-Eye. As far as he knew, the little train that carried a generation’s daydreams through the Stratton mansion ended up “in a train park at Griffith Park, over by Universal.”