The Only ‘The A-Team’ Cast Members Still Alive Today

“In 1972, a crack commando unit was sent to prison by a military court for a crime they didn’t commit.” If you can hear John Ashley’s voice reading that line, and the Mike Post and Pete Carpenter drums kicking in right behind it, you probably spent a good part of the 1980s with The A-Team. Stephen J. Cannell and Frank Lupo’s show premiered on NBC on January 23, 1983, and a week later the first regular episode aired after Super Bowl XVII and landed in the week’s Nielsen top five. For 98 episodes over five seasons, four fugitive Vietnam veterans blew up a lot of jeeps without ever seeming to hurt anybody, and Hannibal lit his cigar and told us he loved it when a plan came together.

Cannell said the whole idea came from NBC chief Brandon Tartikoff, who pitched it as The Road Warrior with “that guy Mr. T in the Rocky movie” behind the wheel. More than four decades later, the van is parked for good, and several of the people who made that show have died. Here is what happened to the cast of the original A-Team, starting with the team members we have lost and ending with the ones who are still with us.

Is George Peppard still alive?

George Peppard was already a movie star when he became Colonel John “Hannibal” Smith. He had played the struggling writer opposite Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany’s in 1961 and starred as the insurance sleuth Banacek in the early 1970s. He had also nearly been Blake Carrington. Peppard was cast in Dynasty in 1980 and let go after a few weeks of clashes with the producers, and he later admitted that John Forsythe did “a better job” than he could have.

Hannibal gave him a second act, but the set was not always a happy one. As Mr. T’s popularity exploded, Peppard reportedly stopped speaking to his co-star directly and passed messages through others. He was diagnosed with lung cancer in 1992 after a lifetime of heavy smoking and had part of a lung removed. George Peppard died on May 8, 1994, in Los Angeles of pneumonia while still fighting the cancer, according to his obituaries. He was 65.

Is Robert Vaughn still alive?

By the fall of 1986, the ratings had slipped, and NBC gave the show a new shape. In the final season, the team was finally caught and put to work on dangerous missions for General Hunt Stockwell, a cool and mysterious operative played by Robert Vaughn in 13 episodes. Casting him was a wink to anyone who remembered Vaughn as Napoleon Solo on The Man from U.N.C.L.E. from 1964 to 1968.

Vaughn never slowed down. He was the gunman Lee in The Magnificent Seven back in 1960, and he earned a PhD in communications from the University of Southern California in 1970. Late in life he found a new audience in Britain as the elegant con man Albert Stroller on the BBC’s Hustle, which ran from 2004 to 2012. Robert Vaughn died on November 11, 2016, after a brief battle with acute leukemia, his manager Matthew Sullivan told the Associated Press. He was 83, and he was the last surviving member of the original Magnificent Seven.

Are William Lucking and Lance LeGault still alive?

Every fugitive needs somebody chasing him, and the team went through colonels the way B.A. went through welding torches. In the first season, it was William Lucking’s Colonel Lynch who kept missing them by minutes. Lucking had a long career playing tough men, and a whole new generation came to know him as the grizzled biker Piney Winston on FX’s Sons of Anarchy from 2008 to 2011. In 1986 he also co-founded the Santa Paula Theater Center in California with his friend Dana Elcar. William Lucking died at his home in Las Vegas on October 18, 2021, at 80. His wife, Sigrid, announced his death in an obituary that November, TheWrap reported, and no cause was made public.

Lance LeGault took over the chase as Colonel Roderick Decker, the growling officer who appeared in 20 episodes between 1983 and 1986. LeGault had started out as Elvis Presley’s stunt double in Girls! Girls! Girls! in 1962, and Magnum, P.I. fans also knew him as Colonel “Buck” Greene. His gravel voice later turned up as Junior the Buffalo in Disney’s Home on the Range. Lance LeGault died of heart failure at his home in Los Angeles on September 10, 2012. He was 77 by most accounts, though some records put his birth in 1937, which would have made him 75.

Is Eddie Velez still alive?

When the show was retooled for that last season, the team picked up a new member. Eddie Velez played Frankie Santana, a Hollywood special effects man whose skills came in handy on the team’s increasingly elaborate jobs. He appeared in 13 episodes from 1986 to 1987 and joined the opening credits early in the season.

Born in Manhattan on June 4, 1958, Velez kept working steadily in television long after the van was retired. In recent years he has turned up on Deputy, Interrogation and Walker: Independence, where he played Gil Santiago in 2022, and IMDb lists him writing and directing short films in 2024 and 2025. Eddie Velez is alive and is 68 years old.

Are Melinda Culea and Marla Heasley still alive?

The pilot opened with a reporter, not a soldier. Melinda Culea played Amy Amanda “Triple A” Allen, the newspaper writer who hires the team in “Mexican Slayride” and then sticks around. She wanted Amy to get into the action, but the producers said no, and by the second season she had very few lines. Her last episode was “The White Ballot” in late 1983. Culea later said the trouble started at the top. “From the beginning, he (George Peppard) told me that I was not wanted or needed on the show,” she wrote in a comment quoted by Remind Magazine in 2025. “At the end of the day, writing for women was not their strong point.”

She landed on her feet with the lead in Glitter, 28 episodes of Knots Landing as Paula Vertosick and a run as Joey Lawrence’s stepmother on Brotherly Love. She married director Peter Markle in 1996, and they raised two children. These days, Culea writes and paints, and her illustrated mystery novel Wondago came out in 2016. Born May 5, 1955, Melinda Culea is alive and is 71.

Marla Heasley stepped in as reporter Tawnia Baker in “The Battle of Bel-Air” and lasted into the third season, when the character was married off in “The Bend in the River.” In the 2006 British documentary Bring Back… The A-Team, Heasley said Peppard greeted her on her first day with “We don’t want you on the show. None of the guys want you here.” She also remembered a wrap party toast, she told vlogger Jim Conlan, as SlashFilm reported: “He made a toast to thank everyone for the season, but it started out with, ‘Being the star of this show …'” Heasley left acting after the 1993 film Amore! and has since worked as a nutritional health coach. Born September 4, 1959, she is alive and is 67.

Is Dirk Benedict still alive?

Templeton “Faceman” Peck almost had a different face. Tim Dunigan played the smooth-talking scrounger in the pilot, but the network replaced him before the series began. “They said I was too young and too tall,” Dunigan told the Associated Press in 1989. “It took me a while to get over it.” According to H&I, it was Peppard who called to cheer him up, reminding Dunigan that he had once been replaced himself as the original Blake Carrington.

Dirk Benedict, who had just finished playing Starbuck on Battlestar Galactica, slid into the role and made it his own. He arrived with a story of his own, too. In the 1970s, he had been diagnosed with a prostate tumor, turned down conventional treatment, and credited a macrobiotic diet suggested by Gloria Swanson with his recovery. He told it all in his 1991 memoir, Confessions of a Kamikaze Cowboy. After the show, he made films like Alaska with Charlton Heston, finished third on Britain’s Celebrity Big Brother in 2007, and played Lieutenant Columbo on a British stage in 2010, the same year he made a cameo in the A-Team movie.

He is still a fixture at fan conventions, and his official fan site listed him for a Battlestar Galactica reunion at Retro Expo in Plano, Texas, in March 2026. Born Dirk Niewoehner on March 1, 1945, in Helena, Montana, Dirk Benedict is alive and is 81, which makes him the oldest surviving member of the main cast.

Is Dwight Schultz still alive?

Captain H.M. “Howling Mad” Murdock was the pilot who lived in a VA psychiatric ward between missions, and Dwight Schultz said the script won him over on the first read. “I laughed out loud,” he told the Cincinnati Post in 1983, according to H&I. The money changed his life as well. “The money is extraordinary. I had nothing until this happened,” he said back then, in another interview H&I has quoted. Critics sneered, but Schultz never did. “People expect me to apologize for the series,” he said in a 1985 United Press International story, and he never would.

A whole new audience met him as the nervous engineer Reginald Barclay on Star Trek: The Next Generation, Star Trek: Voyager and the film Star Trek: First Contact. Then he became one of the busiest voices in animation, from Dr. Animo on Ben 10 to Eddie the Squirrel on CatDog and Chef Mung Daal on Chowder. He has kept working since, voicing Dick Dastardly on Jellystone! in 2024 and joining the cast of WondLa in 2025. Schultz has been married to actress Wendy Fulton since 1983. Born November 24, 1947, in Baltimore, Dwight Schultz is alive and is 78, and he turns 79 on November 24. You can read more about what happened to Dwight Schultz after Murdock.

Is Mr. T still alive?

B.A. Baracus was the reason the show existed. Laurence Tureaud grew up in Chicago, worked as a bouncer and celebrity bodyguard, and then growled “I pity the fool” as Clubber Lang in Rocky III in 1982. A year later, he was the muscle, the mechanic, and the man who had to be knocked out with spiked milk before he’d get on a plane. After the show ended, he starred in T. and T. from 1988 to 1990. In 1995, he was diagnosed with a rare T-cell lymphoma, and he famously joked that it was “cancer with my name on it.”

He beat it, and in 2017 he danced on Dancing with the Stars. This fall Netflix released Untold Mr. T: I Pity the Fool, and the man himself did not hold back. “If you don’t know me, you’re gonna think I’m some monster,” he told The Guardian, as TVLine reported in September. He has also traded the famous gold chains for a quieter life of faith, visiting sick children and speaking at Chicago schools. “I ain’t got time to hate,” he told KUTV in September. “God has blessed me too much to be hating somebody.” Born May 21, 1952, Mr. T is alive and is 74. You can see how much he has changed in these recent photos of Mr. T without the chains and mohawk.

Somewhere in all of that, he summed up what the A-Team years gave him. “If I never made another dollar, if I was never on TV again, all I ever wanted to do is done,” he told The Guardian. For a kid from the Chicago projects who only ever wanted to buy his mother a nice home, it was a plan that came together.