Sally Field turns 80 today, November 6, 2026, and somewhere in the back of every boomer’s memory she is still 20 years old, standing on a windy bluff above San Juan in a starched white cornette, waiting for a gust to lift her into the sky. The Flying Nun premiered on ABC on September 7, 1967, built on Tere Ríos’s 1965 novel The Fifteenth Pelican, and its premise was as simple as it was silly. Sister Bertrille weighed less than 90 pounds, so a stiff breeze under that oversized headpiece was all it took to send her soaring over Convent San Tanco. The show ran three seasons and 82 episodes before it landed for good on April 3, 1970, and it surrounded Field with a sharp ensemble of stage veterans, character actors and a dashing Argentine leading man. Fifty-six years later, only one of those seven familiar faces is still with us, and the woman who wore the cornette has had very mixed feelings about it ever since. Is Alejandro Rey Still Alive? Elvis Presley, Ursula Andress and Alejandro Rey in ‘Fun in Acapulco’ / Everett Collection Every convent comedy needs temptation, and The Flying Nun found it in Carlos Ramirez, the handsome playboy who owned the local casino. Carlos was forever being talked into helping the sisters with one scheme or another, and Alejandro Rey played him with a wink that kept the whole arrangement perfectly innocent. Rey was born in Buenos Aires on February 8, 1930, and he had already acted in Argentine films before Hollywood noticed him. American audiences got an early look at him in 1963 when he appeared alongside Elvis Presley and Ursula Andress in Fun in Acapulco. After the convent closed its doors, he kept busy for another 17 years, playing Orlando Ramirez opposite Robin Williams in Moscow on the Hudson in 1984 and turning up for seven episodes of Dallas in 1986 as Captain Luis Rueda. He also directed television, and when he died the Los Angeles Times remembered him in its headline as both a “‘Flying Nun’ Actor” and a “TV Director.” Sadly, no. Alejandro Rey died of lung cancer on May 21, 1987, at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. He was 57, and he was the first of the show’s regulars to go. His character’s chief nuisance in San Tanco was a police captain who never quite knew what to make of a flying nun. Is Vito Scotti Still Alive? Captain Gaspar Fomento was the local law, a fussy, harried officer who usually ended up on the wrong end of Sister Bertrille’s latest adventure. Vito Scotti played him in the first two seasons, and if his face looked familiar, that was because you had seen it everywhere. Scotti was born Vito Giusto Scozzari in San Francisco on January 26, 1918, and he became one of the busiest character actors of his era. He played a stranded Japanese sailor who didn’t know World War II had ended on Gilligan’s Island, then came back to the island twice as the mad scientist Dr. Boris Balinkoff. He popped up on The Addams Family in three different roles and appeared in six episodes of Columbo as everything from a maître d’ to an undertaker. In 1972 he played Nazorine, the baker, in The Godfather. Off camera he was a gifted cook, and the Desert Sun devoted a 1970 story to his Italian cooking. No, he is not. Vito Scotti died of lung cancer on June 5, 1996, at the Motion Picture and Television Country House and Hospital in Woodland Hills, California. He was 78. The Tampa Bay Times summed up his career in a single phrase when it reported his death, calling him the “Man of a thousand faces.” One of the younger sisters had a résumé that reached all the way back to Neverland. Is Linda Dangcil Still Alive? Linda Dangcil from The Flying Nun / Wikipedia Linda Dangcil played Sister Ana, one of the younger nuns at San Tanco, in 37 episodes. By the time she put on a habit, the trained dancer had already worked with some of Broadway’s biggest names. Born in San Francisco on June 19, 1941, Dangcil was still a teenager in the mid-1950s when she appeared with Mary Martin in Peter Pan, both on Broadway and in the television version. According to BroadwayWorld, Jerome Robbins later chose her as one of the principal dancers in the 1961 film West Side Story. After The Flying Nun, she guest-starred on Here Come the Brides opposite Bruce Lee, spent a long stretch as Elena on the PBS bilingual children’s series Villa Alegre, and lent her voice to the 1980s cartoon Jem. No. Linda Dangcil died on May 7, 2009, at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, after what The Hollywood Reporter described as an eight-year battle with throat cancer. She was 67, and she was survived by her husband, jazz musician Dick Hamilton. The sister who struggled most with English would find her biggest fame three decades later, in a completely different kind of uniform. Is Shelley Morrison Still Alive? View this post on Instagram A post shared by Nicole Kerester (@themagicofpfeiffer) Sister Sixto was the Puerto Rican nun whose tangled English produced some of the show’s biggest laughs, and Shelley Morrison played her from 1967 until the series ended. The irony was that Morrison had grown up speaking Spanish at home. She was born Rachel Mitrani in the Bronx on October 26, 1936, to Jewish parents from Spain, and she spoke mostly Spanish as a child. Her second great act came in 1999, when she booked what was supposed to be a single episode of NBC’s Will & Grace as Rosario Salazar, the unflappable maid to Megan Mullally’s Karen Walker. Rosario stayed until 2006 and even married Sean Hayes’s Jack McFarland to avoid deportation. “Rosario is one of my all-time favorite characters,” Morrison once said, according to The Times of Israel. Shelley Morrison died of heart failure after a brief illness on December 1, 2019, at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. She was 83. Hayes said she “was absolutely hilarious and had the biggest heart,” and her husband of 46 years, Walter Dominguez, said she “believed that the best way to change hearts and minds was through comedy.” The nun who narrated every episode lived longer than anyone else in the cast, and her death stayed a secret for months. Is Marge Redmond Still Alive? Marge Redmond, Sally Field and Shelley Morrison in ‘The Flying Nun’ / Everett Collection Sister Jacqueline was Bertrille’s wise, wry friend inside the convent walls, and Marge Redmond also served as the show’s narrator. The part earned her an Emmy nomination for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series for the 1967 to 1968 season, though she lost to Marion Lorne of Bewitched. Redmond had warmed up for the role by playing a nun just a year earlier, as Sister Liguori opposite Rosalind Russell and Hayley Mills in The Trouble with Angels. Born in Cleveland on December 14, 1924, and raised in nearby Lakewood, Ohio, Redmond came up through stock musicals and Broadway, where she understudied Judy Holliday in Bells Are Ringing and Angela Lansbury in the original Sweeney Todd. In the 1970s, a whole generation knew her as Sarah Tucker, the friendly country innkeeper in the Cool Whip commercials. Alfred Hitchcock cast her in Family Plot in 1976, and Woody Allen gave her a part in Manhattan Murder Mystery in 1993. She was married for a time to the actor Jack Weston. Marge Redmond died on February 10, 2020, at the age of 95. No cause was made public, and her passing went unreported until May of that year, when, as TheWrap reported, it appeared in the in memoriam pages of the quarterly SAG-AFTRA magazine. One more sister remains before we get to Sally, and she may have changed the course of Field’s entire career. Is Madeleine Sherwood Still Alive? Madeleine Sherwood “The Flying Nun” (1968 ABC press photo) / Wikimedia Commons As Reverend Mother Placido, the convent’s Mother Superior, Madeleine Sherwood spent three seasons trying to keep her airborne novice grounded. Viewers may not have realized how much stage history stood behind that stern habit. Sherwood was born Madeleine Thornton in Montreal on November 13, 1922. She originated the role of Abigail in Arthur Miller’s The Crucible on Broadway in 1953, then played Mae, the scheming “Sister Woman,” in Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof on stage and in the 1958 film, and Miss Lucy in Sweet Bird of Youth on stage and on screen. She was blacklisted during the McCarthy era, and according to her Wikipedia biography she was arrested during a 1963 civil rights Freedom Walk in Gadsden, Alabama, and sentenced to six months of hard labor. Her greatest gift to The Flying Nun may have happened off camera. Near the end of the first season, she noticed her young co-star was miserable. “She pulled me in the corner and she stuffed something in my hand,” Field told Bustle in 2022. “There’s an address there. It’s The Actors Studio. This Tuesday night, 8 o’clock, be there.” Field went, and she studied there with Lee Strasberg for years. Madeleine Sherwood died on April 23, 2016, at her childhood home in Lac Cornu, Quebec, at age 93. She had retired in 1989 and gone home to Canada. No cause of death was released, and she was survived by her daughter, Chloe, two grandchildren and six great-grandchildren. Is Sally Field Still Alive? Sally Field from The Flying Nun and today / Everett Collection / ImageCollect Yes, and she is having one of the best years of her life. Sally Field was born in Pasadena, California, on November 6, 1946, which makes her 80 years old today. She was only 18 when Gidget made her a star in 1965, and when that show was canceled after one season, ABC wanted to keep her on the air. She turned down The Flying Nun at first because she thought the idea was ridiculous, and she only reconsidered after her stepfather warned her about her future in the business. She never pretended to love it. “When I was doing The Flying Nun, it was hugely difficult for me because I didn’t want to be doing it,” she told Bustle in 2022. “I was a joke.” Asked by Variety that same year how she got up every morning for a show she disliked, she answered, “It was a job,” and added, as Fox News reported, “I just had to put my head down and go to work and do the very best job I could.” The hardest part came after the show ended. “I couldn’t get on the list. They thought they already knew what I was,” she told People in May 2026, according to TV Insider. Her years at the Actors Studio finally paid off when Jack Nicholson saw her work and recommended her for the 1976 film Stay Hungry. That same year she played a woman with 16 personalities in the TV movie Sybil, which won her an Emmy. She won the Best Actress Oscar for Norma Rae, then a second one for Places in the Heart, accepting it in 1985 with the famous line that people still quote back to her: “You like me!” Then came Steel Magnolias, Forrest Gump and an Oscar nomination for Lincoln. In September, at 79, she set a new Emmy record, becoming the oldest winner ever for lead actress in a limited series or movie for playing a widow who befriends an octopus in Netflix’s Remarkably Bright Creatures. It was her fourth Emmy. Today’s milestone is a bittersweet one, because November 6 is also the anniversary of her mother’s death in 2011, a day we wrote about in the secret Sally Field kept from her mother for decades. The young star who once called herself a joke stood on the Emmy stage in September, thanked the community she had belonged to for “62 years or something,” and spoke up for the people who make art. “With art, we matter,” she said, as Variety reported. “Our voices matter.” Sister Bertrille needed the wind to get off the ground. Sally Field found her own way up. The post The Only Surviving Member of ‘The Flying Nun’ appeared first on DoYouRemember? - The Home of Nostalgia. Author, Dana Daly

Mary Hart turns 76 on Sunday, November 8. Born Mary Johanna Harum on that day in 1950 and raised in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, she spent 29 years as the bright, steady voice of Entertainment Tonight, and Guinness World Records eventually named her the longest-serving host in entertainment news. If you tuned in at dinnertime in the 1980s, hers was the face that told you who had married, who had split and what was opening Friday. That famous voice also landed her in the pages of one of the most respected medical journals in the world. In 1991, a neurologist reported that it was doing something to one viewer that no other voice on television could do, and the next year the story turned up as a plot on Seinfeld. Before we get to what the doctors found, it helps to know how a schoolteacher from South Dakota ended up behind that desk at all. How Did A Miss South Dakota End Up Hosting ‘Entertainment Tonight’? Mary Hart 1997 / Wikimedia Commons Hart was crowned Miss South Dakota in 1970 and went on to the Miss America pageant, where she finished among the top 10. Something clicked when the cameras turned toward her. “I think it literally was the first time I was interviewed on television, I went, ‘That’s what I want to be doing,'” she told the Associated Press in 2017. She first spent a few years teaching high school English in Sioux Falls, and she worked her way through stations in Iowa, Nebraska and Oklahoma before moving to Los Angeles in 1979. She picked up a small part on Days of Our Lives and co-hosted the local edition of PM Magazine, and then came her big break, a national NBC talk show alongside Regis Philbin. It was canceled after only a few months in 1982. Entertainment Tonight asked to interview her about the cancellation, and the next day the show offered her a job as a correspondent. “At the time, neither Regis nor I knew what it would lead to, but it turned out to be the best thing for both of us,” she told Broadcasting & Cable in 2011. Within weeks she was co-hosting, and soon viewers were paying attention to more than her delivery. Why Were Mary Hart’s Legs Insured For Millions? Mary Hart, Red Dress Collection / Wikimedia Commons Over the years Hart sat beside Robb Weller, John Tesh, Bob Goen and Mark Steines, and the camera kept finding her legs. Her then-agent suggested insuring them with Lloyd’s of London, a stunt that echoed the old Betty Grable publicity trick, and ET has reported that the policy covered $1 million per leg. Hart never expected the attention. “I never dreamed it would have legs of its own, so to speak,” she told the AP. “Nor did I ever believe it would be a big news story.” When Dan Rather opened a newscast by asking what the Exxon Valdez and Mary Hart’s legs had in common, she called it “one of the most astonishing headlines I’d ever heard or seen.” She was a sport about it for decades. When she returned to the ET stage in October 2015 for the show’s 35th season and was asked whether the legs were still covered, her answer was breezy. “I doubt it,” she said. “No, I don’t think they have been insured for a long time.” By then she had been off the anchor desk for four years, and leaving had been entirely her choice. Where Is Mary Hart Now? Mary Hart at the 39th Emmy Awards / Wikimedia Commons Hart announced in August 2010 that her 30th season would be her last. “I kept thinking that after 10, 15, 20 years, it would be time to try something else,” she told Broadcasting & Cable. “But it’s finally time for me to move on and do something different. It’s the right time for me.” Her final broadcast aired on May 20, 2011, and what she missed most was the newsroom family. “We went through marriages, births, deaths, celebrated as a family and mourned as a family and I miss that the most,” she said in 2015. Her own family came first after that. Hart married producer Burt Sugarman, the man behind The Midnight Special, in 1989, and the couple have a son, Alec, known as AJ. When the TV academy called in 2017 to tell her she would receive a Daytime Emmy for lifetime achievement, she was on a trip to Chicago with both of them. “My jaw dropped,” she told the AP. “I know Burt and AJ were looking at me concerned that something awful had happened, because I immediately got emotional.” These days Dodgers fans know her best as the season-ticket holder in the front row behind home plate, where IBTimes reported she was cheering through the 2025 World Series. Of all the headlines her career produced, though, the strangest one came from a hospital laboratory in upstate New York. What Did Doctors Find When They Tested Mary Hart’s Voice? Jerry Seinfeld, Jason Alexander and Michael Richards on Seinfeld / Everett Collection In a letter published in the July 11, 1991, issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, Dr. Venkat Ramani of Albany Medical College described a patient in her 40s who had suffered recurring seizures for about four years. The spells brought pressure in her head, a queasy stomach and mental confusion, and she was convinced they started when a particular Entertainment Tonight co-host began to speak. Even her own family doubted her, Ramani told the Associated Press. He never named the patient, but he later confirmed the voice was Mary Hart’s. So Ramani tested it. Electrodes were attached to the woman’s head while she watched a tape of the program with the sound on and off, and he also played her other shows and other female voices. According to UPI’s report on the letter, the seizures were triggered only by Hart’s voice, “and not by visual stimulation, emotional anticipation, or background music.” Watching it happen was “very dramatic,” Ramani told the AP, and once the lab confirmed what she had been saying all along, “she was very relieved.” Nobody could say why Hart’s voice did it. Ramani’s guess was that it reminded the woman of something from her past. “But we couldn’t prove anything,” he told UPI. With medication, and by “assiduously avoiding” the program, she stayed relatively free of seizures through two years of follow-up. She turned down therapy meant to get her used to the voice. As for ET, a spokeswoman for the show had no immediate comment when the news broke. Television did comment, in its own way. The 1992 Seinfeld episode “The Good Samaritan” had Kramer, played by Michael Richards, collapsing every time Hart came on the screen. Writer Peter Mehlman told TheWrap he never did any research on the case. “Just the mere fact that somebody was convulsing to Mary Hart was enough for me,” he said. According to Mehlman, Entertainment Tonight refused to let the show use her real voice when the episode first aired. Years later, the show changed its mind, and in syndicated reruns, Kramer finally hits the floor to the genuine sound of Mary Hart. The post Doctors Once Proved Mary Hart’s Voice Could Trigger Seizures In One ‘Entertainment Tonight’ Viewer appeared first on DoYouRemember? - The Home of Nostalgia. Author, Dana Daly

Lou Ferrigno turns 75 on Monday, November 9, and the man who spent five years as the green giant on CBS’s The Incredible Hulk is still in the gym. He was born Louis Jude Ferrigno on that date in 1951 in Brooklyn, the son of a New York City police lieutenant, and long before anyone painted him green he was a quiet boy who could barely hear the kids teasing him in the schoolyard. That boy hid inside comic books, and one of his favorites was about a mild scientist who turned into a monster when he was pushed too far. How he went from reading the Hulk to becoming him is one of the more unlikely stories in 1970s television, and the ending took him almost seventy years to reach. What Really Caused Lou Ferrigno’s Hearing Loss? Lou Ferrigno at Comic Con Hamilton, 2019 / ImageCollect “I had some really bad ear infections very soon after birth, and, at that time I lost some 75 or 80 percent of my hearing,” he told AudiologyOnline in 2005. Nobody caught it until he was about three, and he was wearing hearing aids by the age of four, AARP reported in 2021. “When I was fairly young, most people didn’t understand what a hearing aid was,” he told the magazine. “I knew that the only person to help myself would be me.” The hearing loss also shaped the way he talked, and children noticed. “It’s been an uphill battle for me because when you have severe hearing loss it affects your speech, it affects everything,” he told People in 2021. He lost the fights that followed, and home was not much softer. His father wanted a tougher son, and Ferrigno remembered the warning for Nevada Public Radio in 2015: “Don’t you ever come home saying you can’t defend yourself.” Then he added something sadder. “I carry his anger and his pain.” So he read. “I felt devastated and emotionally insecure. I would just read the comics and it would give me inspiration and hope,” he told PBS for its Pioneers of Television series. He was, he admitted to People, “obsessed with power,” and at 13 he started lifting weights so he would be strong enough to defend himself. How Did a Kid From Brooklyn End Up Painted Green? Lou Ferrigno in ‘The Incredible Hulk’ / Everett Collection By 1973 Ferrigno had won the IFBB Mr. America title and the first of two straight Mr. Universe crowns. His shot at Arnold Schwarzenegger for the Mr. Olympia title became the spine of the 1977 documentary Pumping Iron, and his father Matty, the man who had pushed him so hard, appeared in it too. The film made the quiet giant from Brooklyn a familiar face, and he liked what he saw. “I was in Pumping Iron with Arnold Schwarzenegger, the docu-drama, and I liked being in front of the camera,” he told the Tulsa Beacon in 2019. Hollywood had already cast someone else as the Hulk. Richard Kiel, the 7-foot-2 actor later known as Jaws in the James Bond films, was in the makeup when, as Ferrigno told it to SlashFilm, “a kid on the set said he wasn’t right and he needed to have big muscles like in the comics.” Ferrigno was brought in for a screen test. “I got painted green,” he said, “and I got hired.” The job was not glamorous. The makeup “took about three-and-a-half to four hours to put on,” he told RetroFan, with a fake forehead, nose and teeth, and he had a shower built into his motor home to scrub off the green. His hearing made the physical demands of playing the Hulk harder still. “I knew I had to pay special attention because I had to constantly read lips,” he told People. One night a cable broke during a car-flipping stunt, and a tired, irritated Ferrigno flipped the car himself. “I think I really became the Hulk,” he told PBS. What Did Bill Bixby Mean to Him? Bill Bixby and Lou Ferrigno in ‘The Incredible Hulk’ / Everett Collection The Hulk had no lines, and Ferrigno and Bill Bixby, who played David Banner, almost never appeared in a scene together. Even so, the veteran star of My Favorite Martian and The Courtship of Eddie’s Father took the young bodybuilder under his wing. “Bill was the best because I learned from him about professionalism,” Ferrigno told the Tulsa Beacon. “He was my mentor and was like my second father.” For a man whose own father had been so hard on him, that phrase carried weight. Ferrigno told RetroFan that he learned by watching Bixby film his scenes and handle his dialogue. The two reunited for three Hulk TV movies between 1988 and 1990, and Bixby directed the last of them, The Death of the Incredible Hulk. Bixby was diagnosed with prostate cancer in 1991 and, as he coped with his illness through work, kept directing the NBC sitcom Blossom until the week before he died at his Los Angeles home on November 21, 1993, at age 59. When the Associated Press asked Ferrigno about his friend, his answer was short. “He didn’t want any sympathy.” More than twenty years later, when Nevada Public Radio asked him about the newer Hulk movies, he went straight back to his old friend. “It’s tough because I loved Bill Bixby,” he said. What Changed When He Could Finally Hear? Lou Ferrigno in Los Angeles, 2022 / ImageCollect After the series, Ferrigno played Hercules, turned up as himself in 20 episodes of The King of Queens, and became a reserve sheriff’s deputy in Los Angeles County in 2006. “Officially I’m a deputy sheriff in Los Angeles County and San Luis Obispo County, but I’ve been deputized in 20 states,” he told the Tulsa Beacon. Through all of it he was still straining to catch every word. In February 2021, at 69, he finally had cochlear implant surgery, and the world came through clearly for the first time in his adult life. “The best hearing aid in the world is not going to give me the clarity of the way I hear now,” he told AARP, before admitting the obvious. “I should have done it sooner.” This fall he crossed off one more dream. On September 30, the former altar boy met Pope Leo XIV after a general audience in St. Peter’s Square, and he flexed for the photographers just as he had on CBS. “I’m here because it’s a lifelong dream for me to meet the pope,” he told the Associated Press. The boy who could not hear the schoolyard taunts now hears just fine, and he still answers the same way he did in 2015. “I’ve been The Hulk my whole life.” The post Lou Ferrigno Turns 75, After Going From Bullied Brooklyn Kid To ‘The Incredible Hulk’ appeared first on DoYouRemember? - The Home of Nostalgia. Author, Dana Daly

He strolled into the squad room with a shaved head, a three-piece suit, and a lollipop where a cigarette used to be, and by the end of its first season on CBS, Kojak had climbed into the top ten. Telly Savalas played Lt. Theo Kojak from October 1973 to March 1978, five seasons and 118 episodes in all, and the line he purred at cops and crooks alike, “Who loves ya, baby?”, stayed with him for the rest of his life. Kojak never worked a case alone, though. Around him stood his old partner turned boss, an eager young detective, a big-hearted sergeant played by Telly’s own brother and a former stand-in who earned a badge of his own. More than half a century after the premiere, only one of those men is still with us, and his story may be the most surprising of all. Is Telly Savalas Still Alive? Telly Savalas in ‘Kojak’ / Everett Collection Before he was Kojak, Savalas was a newsman. He was born Aristotelis Savalas on January 21, 1922, in Garden City, New York, to Greek immigrant parents, and after World War II he hosted Your Voice of America for the State Department before moving on to ABC News. He did not land his first acting job until 1958, when he was already 36, and he made up for lost time quickly. Within four years he had an Oscar nomination for Birdman of Alcatraz, and moviegoers went on to know him as Archer Maggott in The Dirty Dozen and as the Bond villain Blofeld in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. Kojak himself began as a TV movie. Abby Mann wrote The Marcus-Nelson Murders in 1973, drawing on the real Wylie-Hoffert killings in New York, and the detective’s name was still spelled “Kojack.” CBS turned him into a weekly series that fall. Savalas won the Emmy for lead actor in a drama for that first season and picked up two Golden Globes for the role, and according to TV Insider, Kojak was reportedly Queen Elizabeth II’s favorite program by the time she met him at a 1976 state dinner. The lollipop came early. TV Insider traced its first appearance to the episode “Dark Sunday,” where it was meant to help Kojak, and Savalas himself, cut down on smoking. Kevin Dobson later said the candy came from a stagehand’s shirt pocket, and that he flipped it to his co-star when Savalas wanted something in his hand for a scene. The gag cost the star something, too. His official website admitted the lollipops gave him three cavities. CBS canceled the show in 1978 as the ratings slipped, but Savalas never really let the character go. He brought Kojak back for CBS in The Belarus File in 1985 and The Price of Justice in 1987. Then came five more TV movies for ABC in 1989 and 1990, with Kojak promoted to inspector and a young Andre Braugher at his side as Det. Winston Blake. How the original series lost its footing in the first place is a story of its own, and we told it in the controversies that ended Kojak. Fame never fully erased the years of anonymity. “I made 60 movies before ‘Kojak’ with some of the biggest names in the business,” he once said, as the Associated Press recalled in his obituary, and still people would point and say, “There goes what’s-his-name.” Telly Savalas died of prostate cancer on January 22, 1994, one day after his birthday, in the suite he had kept at the Sheraton-Universal Hotel since the 1970s. The wire obituaries that week gave his age as 70, but his documented 1922 birth date made him 72. His spokesman and longtime friend Mike Mamakos told the AP that his family was around him, and that the night before, Savalas had reached toward him to embrace him without saying a word. “He knew,” Mamakos said, calling him “the most giving and courageous man I ever met.” Savalas left six children, and you can read what they are doing today. Is George Savalas Still Alive? George Savalas in ‘Kojak’ / Everett Collection Every squad room needs a big, warm presence, and Kojak’s was Det. Stavros, the heavyset sergeant who, as UPI remembered it, usually had a half-eaten sandwich in hand on the way to a crime scene. The man playing him was Telly’s younger brother George, born December 5, 1924, in the Bronx. For the first two seasons the credits listed him only as “Demosthenes,” his middle name, so viewers would not confuse the two Savalas brothers on the same screen. George had come up the hard way. Before Kojak he drove a cab and waited tables, worked in his father’s hotel and heating businesses and acted off-Broadway, and he taught acting for five years. He picked up film work in The Slender Thread, Genghis Khan and the World War II caper Kelly’s Heroes, and guest spots on Mannix and All in the Family. When Telly revived his detective for The Belarus File in 1985, George was back beside him as Stavros. That reunion was one of his last jobs. George Savalas died of leukemia on October 2, 1985, at UCLA Medical Center in Los Angeles after an illness of about three months. UPI reported his age as 58, but his 1924 birth date made him 60. He left his wife, Robin, and six children, and Telly would carry on without his little brother for more than eight years. Is Dan Frazer Still Alive? Telly Savalas Dan Frazer Jean LeBouvier Kojak 1975 / Wikimedia Commons Capt. Frank McNeil was the one man in the precinct who could tell Kojak no, partly because the two of them had once been partners. Dan Frazer, who played him in 117 episodes, was a New Yorker through and through. He was born November 20, 1921, in the West Side neighborhood then called Hell’s Kitchen, and he found his way into theater while serving in the Army’s Special Services division during World War II. By the time Kojak came along, Frazer had already spent two decades as the kind of character actor audiences recognized without always knowing his name. BroadwayWorld listed his Broadway credits as including Goodbye, Charlie and Who Was That Lady I Saw You With?, and his first film role was Father Murphy in Lilies of the Field in 1963. Woody Allen cast him as the psychiatrist in Take the Money and Run, and he turned up in Cleopatra Jones, Car 54, Where Are You? and Barney Miller. He kept working long after McNeil hung up his captain’s bars. From 1986 to 1996 he played Lt. McCloskey on As the World Turns, and in his later years he had small parts on Law & Order and in Allen’s Deconstructing Harry. His final film, The Pack, came out in 2009, when he was in his late eighties. Dan Frazer died of cardiac arrest at his Manhattan home on December 16, 2011, at 90. His daughter, Susanna, told the Associated Press that her father was a “very truthful, naturalistic actor,” which is about as fine a compliment as one working actor can pay another. His wife of 56 years, Lillian, had died in 1999. Is Kevin Dobson Still Alive? View this post on Instagram A post shared by The '80s Ruled (@80sruledtheworld) Det. Bobby Crocker was the young partner who did the legwork, took the lectures and got the lollipop jokes, and Kevin Dobson played him in all but two episodes. He was born March 18, 1943, in Jackson Heights, Queens, one of seven children of a grammar school janitor, and before acting he worked the Long Island Rail Road as a trainman, brakeman and conductor. The Army had prepared him for the part in a way no drama class could. “I was a military policeman in the Army, so I knew how to hold a gun and throw somebody against a wall,” he told Boomer magazine in 2016, as Legacy.com recalled. After his audition, he said, “I got a call [the next night] asking if I’d sign a contract.” The partnership lasted well past the final episode, and the two men remained friends. When ABC brought Kojak back, Dobson returned for the 1990 movie It’s Always Something, with Crocker now working as an assistant district attorney. By then he had a second famous role. Dobson joined Knots Landing in 1982 as M. Patrick “Mack” MacKenzie and stayed until the show ended in 1993, winning five Soap Opera Digest Awards along the way, including one with Michele Lee for favorite super couple. In 2008 he became the fourth actor to play Mickey Horton on Days of Our Lives. Off camera he never forgot where he came from, and he twice chaired the National Salute to Hospitalized Veterans. Kevin Dobson died on September 6, 2020, at a hospital in Stockton, California, at 77. Early reports said heart attack, but his representative told The Hollywood Reporter he had been struggling with an autoimmune deficiency. He left Susan, his wife since 1968, and their three children, Mariah, Patrick and Sean. Instead of flowers, his family asked for something he used to say: “If you love America, Thank a Vet.” Is Mark Russell Still Alive? Mark Russell over the years / Wikipedia Of all the detectives in Kojak’s squad, Saperstein had the most unlikely route to the precinct. According to his Wikipedia biography, which cites newspaper coverage from the 1970s, Mark Russell started out as Telly Savalas’s stand-in before the producers created the part of Det. Saperstein for him. He played the role through the whole run and came back for The Belarus File in 1985, which turned out to be his last acting job. Long before Hollywood, Russell had seen real combat. Born in Brooklyn near Coney Island in 1929, he trained in Japan and was sent to the front lines in Korea, and in 1952 at Heartbreak Ridge a mortar round killed one of his men and wounded his right arm, as he told Denver7. Back in California he took a job in the mail room at Paramount and worked his way into the story department, and the small parts followed on Bonanza, The Twilight Zone, Hogan’s Heroes, Batman and Star Trek, plus a turn in Elvis Presley’s Viva Las Vegas. He has never pretended to be more than he was. “I wasn’t a big star, but I worked with the best,” he told Denver7, adding that the residual checks once reached about $100,000 a year. He and his wife, Evellyn, were married 59 years and raised five children before her death. Yes, Mark Russell is still alive. Denver7 gave his age as 95 in May 2024, which puts him at about 97 today. He lives a quiet life in Colorado, and when Military History Traveler sat down with him in December 2025, it reported that he had recently served as grand marshal of a parade of American Legion veterans. In 2024 the BOLDERBoulder race honored him at its Memorial Day ceremony, and he told Denver7 it was “such a great honor” to stand there for friends who had died. The last man from Kojak’s squad room is still answering the call. The post The Only ‘Kojak’ Cast Member Still Alive Today appeared first on DoYouRemember? - The Home of Nostalgia. Author, Dana Daly

“Rollin’, rollin’, rollin’…” If you can hear Frankie Laine’s voice and the crack of that whip right now, you probably spent Friday nights in front of Rawhide. Dimitri Tiomkin wrote the music and Ned Washington wrote the words, and the song became so much a part of American life that it turned up again in The Blues Brothers in 1980, sung to a room full of angry country fans who suddenly loved it. The show itself premiered on CBS on January 9, 1959, and followed trail boss Gil Favor and his drovers as they pushed a herd from San Antonio toward Sedalia, Missouri. It ran for 217 black-and-white episodes, climbed as high as No. 6 in the Nielsen ratings during the 1960-61 season, and turned a young unknown named Clint Eastwood into a star. CBS pulled it after 13 episodes of an eighth season in December 1965. Six decades later, only one of the men who rode that trail is still with us. Is Eric Fleming Still Alive? Ver esta publicación en Instagram Una publicación compartida por Dario David (@classictv_series) Eric Fleming was the boss, and Gil Favor was the role that made him. Born Edward Heddy Jr. on July 4, 1925, in Santa Paula, California, he survived a rough childhood and a serious Navy injury that left him needing extensive plastic surgery on his face. He found his way to Broadway, where he worked in the musical Plain and Fancy, before CBS put him in the saddle for seven seasons. In late 1963, Fleming turned down an offer to star in an Italian Western called A Fistful of Dollars, and that role went to his co-star instead. Then, during the summer break in 1965, CBS let him go as a new producer tried to rescue the ratings. Fleming joked to TV Guide that “CBS fired me because they were paying me a million dollars a year,” though his salary was closer to $220,000. He moved quickly into Doris Day’s comedy The Glass Bottom Boat and three episodes of Bonanza. Sadly, Eric Fleming is not alive. On September 28, 1966, while filming a TV adventure called “High Jungle” in Peru, his dugout canoe overturned on the Huallaga River. Co-star Nico Minardos swam to safety, but Fleming was swept away by the current and drowned. He was 41 and, according to People, engaged to Lynne Garber at the time. Is James Murdock Still Alive? Every cattle drive needs somebody to take the blame when the beans burn, and on Rawhide that was Harkness “Mushy” Mushgrove III, the cook’s eager young helper. James Murdock was born David Lee Baker on June 22, 1931, in Normal, Illinois, and his first screen role was a young outlaw on Have Gun – Will Travel in 1958. A year later he was ducking Wishbone’s ladle, and he stayed through more than 200 episodes. After the show ended he worked less often, taking a guest spot on Gunsmoke in 1966 and going back to his birth name for small film parts, including a role in The Godfather Part II in 1974. James Murdock died on December 24, 1981, in California at just 50 years old, only 16 days after another member of the crew. Is Rocky Shahan Still Alive? That crew member was Rocky Shahan, the drover Joe Scarlet. Born Robert Ray Shahan on March 4, 1919, in Corinth, Texas, he came to Hollywood as a stuntman and horseman, which is why you so often saw him on the reins of a stagecoach on shows like Gunsmoke. He had also ridden in Cattle Empire, the 1958 Western that helped inspire Rawhide. Shahan stayed with the drive from 1959 to 1965 and kept working in Westerns until the end of the decade before going home to Texas. Rocky Shahan died on December 8, 1981, in Denton, Texas, at 62. Is Paul Brinegar Still Alive? Before he was Wishbone, Paul Brinegar played a crusty trail cook named Tom Jefferson Jeffrey in that same Cattle Empire, and the part fit him so well that Rawhide built a character around it. Born December 19, 1917, in Tucumcari, New Mexico, he had already spent two years as Mayor Dog Kelley of Dodge City on The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp. George Washington Wishbone, grumbling over his chuck wagon, was the role he would be remembered for, and he was one of only a handful of actors who lasted all eight seasons. He stayed in the West afterward, playing Jelly Hoskins on Lancer from 1968 to 1970. In 1973 he turned up as the barman in High Plains Drifter, which was directed by his old trail partner, Clint Eastwood. His last role was a stagecoach driver in Mel Gibson’s Maverick in 1994. Paul Brinegar died of emphysema in Los Angeles on March 27, 1995, at 77, and the Los Angeles Times ran his obituary under the simple headline “Appeared in TV’s ‘Rawhide.'” Is Steve Raines Still Alive? Steve Raines did not have to learn to look like a cowboy. Born June 17, 1916, in Grants Pass, Oregon, he worked as a real rodeo rider and stuntman before he ever spoke a line, and People described him as a working cowboy who kept his life private. As drover Jim Quince he appeared in almost every episode, and when Favor left in the final season, Quince moved up to ramrod. Raines kept guest-starring on TV Westerns into the 1970s, with his last known appearance on Gunsmoke in 1974. He went home to Grants Pass in 1986, and Steve Raines died there on January 4, 1996, at 79. Is Sheb Wooley Still Alive? Ver esta publicación en Instagram Una publicación compartida por Classic Retrovision Milestones (@classic_retrovision_milestones) Scout Pete Nolan rode ahead of the herd, and the man who played him already had a hit record. Sheb Wooley, born April 10, 1921, in Erick, Oklahoma, had played the outlaw Ben Miller in High Noon, and in 1958 his novelty song “The Purple People Eater” went to No. 1 and stayed there for weeks. He left Rawhide in early 1962, and the show explained that Nolan was off scouting for the Army before bringing him back for nine episodes in season seven. Wooley never stopped working. He recorded comic country songs as his drunken alter ego Ben Colder, wrote the theme song for Hee Haw and joined its cast, and his widow, Linda, later confirmed that he was the voice behind the famous “Wilhelm scream” heard in Star Wars and hundreds of other films. He was diagnosed with leukemia in 1996, and Sheb Wooley died of the disease in Nashville on September 16, 2003, at 82, NPR reported. Is Robert Cabal Still Alive? Every drive needed someone to tend the horses, and on Rawhide that job belonged to the wrangler “Hey Soos” Patines, played by Robert Cabal in 115 episodes. Born April 7, 1917, in Honolulu, Cabal had a face that let Hollywood cast him as almost any nationality without makeup, and before Rawhide he had played the bandit Joaquin Murrieta in The Man Behind the Gun. Some episodes had Hey Soos facing prejudice from strangers outside the outfit. Cabal kept guest-starring on shows like The Big Valley until 1967 and then stepped away from acting. Robert Cabal died in Los Angeles on May 11, 2004, at 87. Are John Ireland And Raymond St. Jacques Still Alive? John Ireland / Everett Collection When CBS rebuilt the show for its last season in 1965, it brought in fresh faces to ride alongside the remaining crew. The biggest name was John Ireland, born January 30, 1914, in Vancouver, who had earned an Oscar nomination for All the King’s Men and had ridden alongside John Wayne in Red River. He played the scout Jed Colby. Ireland kept acting into the 1990s and also ran a restaurant in Santa Barbara, California. He died of leukemia there on March 21, 1992, at 78. Raymond St. Jacques, born James Arthur Johnson on March 1, 1930, in Hartford, Connecticut, made history as the rider Simon Blake, becoming the first Black actor cast as a regular on a prime-time Western series. He went on to star in Cotton Comes to Harlem in 1970 and to play Frederick Douglass in Glory in 1989. He died of lymphoma in Los Angeles on August 27, 1990, at 60. The third newcomer, David Watson, played the young Englishman Ian Cabot in five episodes and later took over the role of Cornelius in Beneath the Planet of the Apes. He died of a heart attack in New York on October 5, 2014, at 74. Is Clint Eastwood Still Alive? Clint Eastwood then and now / Everett Collection / ImageCollect That leaves Rowdy Yates. Clint Eastwood was born on May 31, 1930, in San Francisco, and he was a struggling actor with a few small film parts behind him when CBS cast him as Favor’s hot-headed ramrod in 1958. He did his own riding and fighting, and the long days on the trail gave him his first itch to be behind the camera. “I thought, we should get right in the middle of this damn stampede,” he remembered in a 1999 collection of his interviews, as Slashfilm recounted. He even asked Fleming whether he would mind if he directed an episode, but “CBS said no more series actors could direct their own shows.” He found his own way out. The Italian Western Fleming turned down became Eastwood’s, and A Fistful of Dollars made him a movie star while he was still on the drive. “In Rawhide I did get awfully tired of playing the conventional white hat,” he later admitted. When Fleming was fired, Eastwood took over as trail boss for the final season, and then came Dirty Harry, Unforgiven, Million Dollar Baby and more than five decades of directing. Yes, Clint Eastwood is still alive, and he is 96 years old. His most recent film as a director was Juror #2 in 2024. In June, reports quoting his son Kyle said his father had retired, but his son Scott said he had not heard that from his father, and we covered that family back-and-forth as it happened. As recently as November 1, ScreenRant was writing about the “96-year-old” Eastwood as his World War II film Flags of Our Fathers arrived on free streaming. He is the last man left from the drive, and when that whip cracks and Frankie Laine starts singing, Rowdy Yates is still the youngest face in the herd. If you want more trail dust, here are the best classic TV Westerns of the ’50s and ’60s. Series star Clint Eastwood with Barbara in the two-part ‘Damon’s Way’ in Season 7 (Everett Collection) The post The ‘Rawhide’ Cast Has Only One Surviving Star Left appeared first on DoYouRemember? - The Home of Nostalgia. Author, Dana Daly