As Kirstie Alley dies aged 71, TOM LEONARD looks back on the life of the Trump-voting Cheers star

Viewers will primarily remember Kirstie Alley as the hilariously neurotic and ambitious bar manager on Cheers, one of the most successful American sitcoms ever.

When she wasn’t fending off the advances of womanizing bar owner Sam Malone (Ted Danson), she dreamed of a rich man winning her over.

But when the actress admitted years later that Donald Trump had swept her politically, all hell broke loose.

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen that many slurs in my life,” Alley tweeted 30 minutes after his Twitter post ahead of the 2020 election revealing he would vote for Trump “because he’s NOT a politician.”

As he would later observe in amazement at Hollywood’s double standards: “You can be cooking meth and sleeping with hookers, but as long as, apparently, you didn’t vote for Trump.” . .’

Tinseltown was, of course, outraged by her political leanings and said she was turned down. But then the ardent Scientologist, who claimed the controversial “church” saved her from drug addiction and once danced on Oprah’s stage in a red lace bikini after losing 75 pounds, never shied away from causing a stir.

Hollywood had a lot to say about Alley yesterday, but this time it was effusive in its praise after the announcement that the two-time Emmy winner had died of colon cancer at age 71. Her mother passed away after a recently discovered battle with cancer,’ her family said in a statement issued Monday night.

“She was surrounded by her closest family and she fought very hard, leaving us with the certainty of her never-ending joie de vivre and the adventures that awaited her. As iconic as she was on screen, she was an even more incredible mother and grandmother.”

Friend John Travolta, a fellow Scientologist and his co-star in the 1989 film Look Who’s Talking, said: “Kirstie was one of the most special relationships I’ve ever had. I love you, Kirstie. I know we’ll see each other again.

Ted Danson said Alley had been ‘truly brilliant’ on Cheers, adding: ‘I’m so sad and so thankful for all the times he made me laugh. I send my love to your children. As you well know, his mother had a heart of gold. I will miss her.’

Kelsey Grammer, who played Dr. Frasier Crane on Cheers, and later starred in the spin-off Frasier, said: “I always believed that grief over a public figure is a private matter, but I will say that I loved her.”

As for Donald Trump, he said: ‘Kirstie was a great person who really loved America. We will miss her!!!’

Alley’s route to stardom was unconventional. The daughter of a Kansas lumber company owner, she dropped out of college to pursue interior design, but later developed a cocaine addiction.

He moved to Los Angeles and joined Narconon, an addiction rehab program run by the Church of Scientology. She later insisted that she had not heard anything negative about the group, considered a cult in some countries. She said that she “answered a lot of questions for me” and helped her pursue her ambition to act her own.

He made his pointy-eared film debut playing a fellow Vulcan to Mr. Spock in the 1982 film Star Trek II: The Wrath Of Khan. Various film and television roles followed, but he broke through in 1987 by replacing Shelley Long on Cheers as the bar manager and object of Ted Danson’s desire.

She played Rebecca Howe for six seasons and is widely credited with saving Cheers, as Long’s relationship with Danson was considered by many to be the best thing about the popular American TV show.

They predicted that he would not survive Long’s departure, but Alley proved the doomsayers spectacularly wrong.

He established an onscreen chemistry with Danson that was arguably even easier to watch, playing a messy, multifaceted character who was glamorous and tough-talking, but also eccentric and vulnerable.

Alley said making the show was wonderfully chaotic, with the cast, which included Woody Harrelson, always misbehaving.

“We never paid attention, we were always in trouble, we were never on time,” he said. ‘If #MeToo had been around when we did Cheers, we’d all be in prison.

“We used to take each other naked, kick the bathroom doors open… before shooting, we’d stick our tongues down our throats.”

Like Harrelson, he found Cheers a useful springboard into Hollywood. Look Who’s Talking, a comedy film with Travolta in which Bruce Willis voiced the role of his baby was a hit with audiences, if not critics, and spawned two sequels.

Alley did not hesitate to fight to comply with the restrictions of her industry to stay slim. She said her weight increased to over 16 as she consumed up to 28,000 calories a day, eating “with wild abandon.” She told Oprah Winfrey that she had an epiphany in 2004 when she realized that her weight had become the only thing about her that the media really cared about.

She quit smoking and became a spokesperson for the weight loss firm Jenny Craig. In 2005, she made the comedy series Fat Actress, which addressed her efforts to lose weight and return to television. Five years later, she blazed the same trail with the reality series Kirstie Alley’s Big Life.

Alley also launched his own weight loss company, denying claims that it was linked to Scientology.

But in 2013 she had to pay a $130,000 settlement after being sued over allegations that her substantial weight loss was due to exercise rather than her diet products.

However, she said she hated the waif look: “I have this theory that skinny women aren’t sexy.” For me, being sexy is not the same as looking skin and bones.’

Reality contests became a specialty for Alley: in the US, she competed on Dancing With The Stars in 2011 and this year she appeared on The Masked Singer, while in the UK she was a finalist on Celebrity Big Brother in 2018. And the actress insisted she tailored her career to fit her family life, which was sometimes messy.

Her seven-year marriage to her high school sweetheart, Bob Alley, ended in divorce in 1977, as did a subsequent 14-year marriage to actor Parker Stevenson, with whom she adopted two children, William and Lillie. They divorced in 1997 and fought a custody battle over the couple.

In a 2021 memoir, The Art Of Men (I Prefer Mine Al Dente), Alley wrote about falling in love with Patrick Swayze and John Travolta.

She said she was immediately drawn to Swayze when they co-starred in the 1980s civil war drama North And South.

“We didn’t have an affair,” he said. But then again, I think what I did was worse. Because I think when you fall in love with someone when you’re married, you jeopardize your own marriage and their marriage. It’s doubly bad.

She described Travolta as the “greatest love” of her life, but again resisted temptation because she was married. ‘Believe me, she took everything she had… not to run off and marry John,’ she said.

While some celebrities have unfollowed Scientology over its many public embarrassments, Alley remained loyal. He refused to reprise his role as Cheers in the Frasier spin-off, as the latter was about psychiatrists, a profession condemned by Scientologists.

Since 2000, Alley had lived near Scientology headquarters in Clearwater, Florida, in a waterfront mansion once owned by former church member Lisa Marie Presley. In 2007, she reportedly gave the group $5 million.

The arrival of Donald Trump on the Republican scene shifted criticism of Alley towards his political views.

She claimed that her support for Trump, which she first expressed in 2016 after previously endorsing Barack Obama, led to her not getting a job in pro-Democratic Hollywood. She and she recently caused offense on social media by claiming that she didn’t “know what’s real or what’s fake” about the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

But the actress who in Cheers could put down a bar full of unruly regulars with just one look rarely seemed overly concerned with what others thought of her.