Candid actor overcame drug addiction to find stardom as Rebecca in Cheers

Kirstie Alley, who has died aged 71, was an Emmy Award-winning comic actor best remembered for playing high-strung bar manager Rebecca Howe on the TV sitcom Cheers, and for starring in the Look Who’s Talking verbalbaby film franchise.

Over her four-decade career, Alley was known for her candidness – whether openly sharing her struggle to control her weight, ardently defending the Church of Scientology, to which she belonged for decades, or giving an off-colour speech at the Emmys after winning in 1991 for Cheers.

Ted Danson, her Cheers co-star, once called her ‘‘a biker chick crossed with an earth mother’’ and praised her lack of self-consciousness. ‘‘She knows no fear,’’ he told the Los Angeles Times in 1990. ‘‘Most of us walk around concerned about how people perceive us, but she is totally unconcerned about that.’’

With her buxom appearance, cascades of brunette hair and husky voice, Alley became a household name in 1987 after replacing Shelley Long on Cheers. Despite only a modest impact in a handful of TV and movie roles, she was tapped for Cheers after cocreator and executive producer James Burrows saw her as the sensual Maggie in a Los Angeles stage production of Tennessee Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.

‘‘You don’t see it coming,’’ Burrows told the Times. ‘‘She’s got that hair and that face, and you don’t think a woman who looks like that should be funny. And yet she is. Comedy is surprise, and comedy coming from this sultry woman surprises you and makes you laugh that much harder.’’

Her character entered Cheers as manager of the Boston bar, and thus the boss of Danson’s lothario former bar owner, Sam Malone. Bold but perpetually insecure, she becomes attracted to Sam, and the dynamics shift further as he regains control of his bar and demotes her to bartender.

Amid the continuing high ratings, Alley starred as a new mother opposite John Travolta in Look Who’s Talking (1989) and its critically drubbed but commercially successful sequels.

In 1994, she earned a second Emmy for lead actress in a miniseries or special for her role in the made-for-TV movie David’s Mother, in which she played a woman caring for her son with autism.

She starred in the TV show Veronica’s Closet (1997-2000) as a former model who runs a lingerie catalogue company. Reviewers commented on her stiletto-sharp delivery of sitcom lines, as she tells a gaggle of anorexic models: ‘‘There are M&Ms out there; maybe the three of you could share one.’’

In addition to the film comedy Drop Dead Gorgeous (1999) and the miniseries The Last Don, she continued making cameos on actor b January 12, 1951 d December 5, 2022 sitcoms and starred in a shortlived mock-reality series, Fat Actress (2005), in which a fictionalised version of herself struggles to lose weight.

Kirstie Louise Alley, whose father owned a lumber company, was born in Wichita, Kansas, and recalled wanting to act since her childhood. Describing herself as rebellious, artsy and lacking direction as a teenager, she said she enjoyed testing the boundaries of her conventional upbringing by breaking curfew, hitching motorcycle rides around the state and using fake IDs to gain entry to bars. She briefly attended Kansas State University and the University of Kansas before leaving college to work as an interior decorator.

She ploughed her income into drugs and, by the end of the 1970s, was addicted to cocaine. She attended Narconon, a drug-treatment programme run by the Church of Scientology, and said she walked out clean in 1979. She remained a supporter of the controversial organisation.

Inspired by the book Dianetics, by

Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard, she decided to quit her life in Kansas and move to Los Angeles to pursue acting, saying the book’s message was, ‘‘If you want something, you go get it, and you work for it.’’

Her marriages to Robert Alley (no blood relation) and actor Parker Stevenson, with whom she had two adopted children, ended in divorce.

She was a spokeswoman for Jenny Craig’s weight-loss programme and in 2011 called out comedian and TV host David Letterman for making jokes about her size when she appeared on Dancing With the Stars.

In more recent years, she became known for her comments on Twitter, where she raised doubts about the #MeToo movement, played down the threat of the coronavirus and touted ivermectin as a treatment for it. She also publicly supported former president Donald Trump.

Her career and legacy were united by her willingness to be blunt. ‘‘I’ve always felt like if someone asks me something, they want the real answer,’’ she told Good Housekeeping magazine in 2007. ‘‘Usually people think I’m from New York. The only similarity between New Yorkers and Midwesterners is that what you see is what you get.’’ –

‘‘You don’t think a woman who looks like that should be funny. And yet she is.’’ Cheers co-creator James Burrows