The interpreter was very popular in the eighties and nineties for her participation in the television production 'Cheers' and the film saga 'Look Who's Talking
The actress Kirstie Alley has died at the age of 71, as confirmed by the family of the interpreter, who became very popular in the eighties and nineties for her participation in the television series Cheers and in the film saga Look who speaks. According to a statement published on social networks by his children, William True and Lillie Parker, Alley, who was born in Wichita (Kansas), in 1951, has died as a result of a "recently discovered" cancer that he faced "with great force".
"She leaves us with the certainty of her inexhaustible joy of living the adventures that always remained to come," the note adds. "The enormous enthusiasm and passion for his life, his children, grandchildren, and animals, not to mention his eternal joy to create, are unparalleled and leave us with great inspiration to live life to the fullest," added his children, the result of her marriage to fellow actor Parker Stevenson. The family has thanked the doctors and health workers at the Moffit Cancer Center hospital in Florida, where she was hospitalized.
Alley gained fame by playing Rebecca Howe, the manager of Cheers, the most famous bar on American television. The series took over from MASH as a comedy icon for NBC long before Jerry Seinfeld reinvented the norm for this genre on television. Alley became a star of a groundbreaking series that launched both his career and those of Ted Danson, Woody Harrelson, Kelsey Grammer (whose character on the series, psychiatrist Frasier Crane, later starred in a spinoff, Frasier), and George Wendt.
The character of Alley, who was not there at the beginning, was introduced by the writers to take oxygen in a series that lasted for 11 seasons. Rebecca Howe appeared in the sixth, as a female replacement for actress Shelley Long, who was the waitress at the bar, owned by Sam (played by Ted Danson). At that point in the story, Sam had just sold his bar to a large corporation and went from commanding to obeying Alley's orders, the one in charge of directing the transition after the sale. She did it with the sternness expected of a business school graduate.
Alley received five Emmy Award nominations for this role. Finally, she took it in 1991 in the category of best actress. In 1994 she won another statuette for her participation in the miniseries David's Mother, where she played the mother of a minor with autism.
Cheers meant a before and after for Alley. Her start in the industry had been in the movies. In 1982 she made her big screen debut in one of the most renowned sagas in the world of American science fiction, Star Trek. Alley played a lieutenant from the planet Vulcan, with its familiar pointy-eared inhabitants. The film in which she appeared, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, is one of the best-rated in the saga. She also appeared alongside great idols of the time, such as Tom Selleck, in Runaway: Special Brigade, and John Hurt in Challenge to Fate, both from 1984. In 1988, she shared the lead with Sidney Poitier in Shoot to Kill.
However, her big movie success came in the 1989 comedy Look Who's Talking, where Alley played Mollie, a single mother who must decide whether to raise her baby (voiced by Bruce Willis) with James, starring John Travolta, a taxi driver friend, after being abandoned by the baby's biological father, Albert (George Segal). The film by director Amy Heckerling was not well received by critics, who called it cute and simple, but it became a huge box office success. It grossed almost 300 million dollars worldwide, enough to launch two more films that continued the plot and marked the commercial cinema of the early nineties.
Alley was born into a middle-class family in Wichita, where she worked as an interior designer until she decided to go to Hollywood in 1981 without knowing anyone there, solely on what she called "an impulse." Just six months later she was dressed in the uniform of the Enterprise, the flagship of Star Trek.
Although she had moved to California, the actress did not espouse the prevailing ideology on the West Coast. She was a conservative (although she said she voted for Obama) and later became an ardent supporter of Donald Trump, whom she supported in his 2016 run for the White House. She later affirmed that her support for the US president led her to be included in a Hollywood blacklist. In fact, in May 2021, Trump sent him a message: "She is very strong and intelligent ... You have to support Kirstie Alley," the former president wrote. She thanked him for the gesture and said that she missed him on Twitter, from where Trump had been expelled in January 2021 for "inciting violence" after the assault on the Capitol by a group of ultra-supporters of the president.
Alley was also known for her humor. She wasn't afraid to laugh at herself. In 2005, she appeared in the comedy Fat Actress, broadcast on Showtime, in which she played an actress who, like her in real life, was trying to keep her career alive in an industry obsessed with an image that did not forgive the kilos of weight. further. That was a real battle during the lifetime of Alley, who for years was also a spokesperson for a company that sold weight-loss products.
