Kirstie Alley, the smokey-voiced actress with the piercing eyes who played the tavern manager Rebecca Howe on Cheers and the Vulcan Starfleet officer Lt. Saavik in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, has died at the age of 71.
Alley’s children, True and Lillie Parker, announced her passing on her Twitter account Monday evening. “We are sad to inform you that our incredible, fierce and loving mother has passed away after a battle with cancer, only recently discovered,” they wrote, adding that “she was surrounded by her closest family and fought with great strength.”
They also thanked the medical caregivers who treated her at the Moffitt Cancer Center and Research Institute in Tampa, Fla.
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Alley appeared in more than 70 movies and TV shows during her career, but is best known for taking on the role of Howe during the sixth season of Cheers, playing an ambitious middle manager who ran the Boston watering hole after it was purchased by the Lillian Corporation. Howe was added to the sitcom after previous lead Shelley Long left the series to pursue film projects. While Long’s fussy and erudite waitress Diane was a mismatched contrast to Ted Danson‘s barkeep Sam Malone, Alley’s brassy Rebecca was surprisingly similar, with sparks flying because she matched his boldness and confidence.
Ultimately, the implacable Rebecca was revealed to be just as neurotic and messy as the rest of Cheers‘ denizens, and the role won Alley a best comedic actress Emmy in 1991.
Her breakthrough came in 1982 when she landed her first film role, playing Lt. Saavik in the acclaimed Star Trek sequel The Wrath of Khan. In a 2016 interview, Alley said her arched eyebrows, which gave her a naturally skeptical look, made her a perfect fit for the character, who was half-Vulcan and half-Romulan. “People my whole life teased me,” she told StarTrek.com. “Even my friends would go, ‘Oh God, your eyebrow goes up like Spock.’” She said landing the role was a surprise, even to her. “I had not ever had an acting role,” she said. “I didn’t walk around telling people I was an aspiring actress—because who isn’t, in Hollywood? So I was doing some decorating jobs, and I was also a housekeeper. … I wasn’t even in the Screen Actors Guild.”
As Alley worked through the audition process, getting closer and closer to landing the role, tragedy struck. “I was supposed to have a meeting on a Monday for my final audition for Star Trek, in front of Paramount and the studio guys,” she recalled. “That weekend, my parents were in a car wreck and my mother was killed. That was on a Friday night. I flew back to Kansas.” She told her agent to be honest with the filmmakers about what happened. Her rep warned that she would be unlikely to get the role, given her lack of experience. “By some kind of huge miracle they said, ‘Okay. We’ll wait,’ which I still, to this day, am more grateful for than anything that’s ever happened in my career,” Alley said.
Star Trek fans adored her performance, and Saavik went on to be a part of Star Trek lore in its extended books and other storytelling, but Alley never reprised the role onscreen. She said the producers intended to add Saavik to the third Star Trek film, but offered her an even smaller paycheck. “I’m not trying to sound ungrateful at all, because what they paid me when you did your first job is fine,” she told StarTrek.com. “But it wasn’t like it was a massive amount of money, trust me. It just wasn’t. And so that never made sense to me. Like, ‘You’re not paying as much as the first one, and it’s a bigger role?’ It just didn’t make sense to me.”
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