Kirstie Alley, actress who became best known for her award-winning portrayal of the wisecracking bar manageress in the hit sitcom Cheers – obituary

Kirstie Alley, the actress, who has died of cancer aged 71, shot to fame as the wisecracking Rebecca Howe, the voluptuous bar manageress she played for six years in the massively popular American sitcom Cheers, though she became better known in later life for her battles with her weight.

During its 11-year run Cheers, a comedy about a bunch of regulars who meet for a chat and a drink in a Boston bar (though without ever showing signs of intoxication), enjoyed worldwide success, broadcasting to regular audiences of 35 million in the US and six million in the UK, and winning a slew of awards as one of the best-scripted, wittiest comedies on either side of the Atlantic.

Kirstie Alley joined the show in 1987 at the height of its popularity after Sam Malone (Ted Danson), the lecherous owner-bartender, ran out of money and had to sell the bar, and her character, razor-sharp Rebecca, was brought in by the new proprietor as manageress, replacing Shelley Long.

She starred in the show until it went off air in 1993, always getting the better of Sam in their verbal jousts and delivering the show’s relentlessly snappy dialogue with impeccable comic timing. Her performance won her a Golden Globe and an Emmy for best lead actress in a comedy series in 1991.

She capitalised on her success with the Look Who’s Talking movie series, a romcom in which she played New Yorker Mollie, who gets pregnant after an affair with a married man and falls in love with the taxi driver (Kirstie Alley’s old friend and fellow Scientologist, John Travolta) who speeds her to hospital and witnesses the birth of her baby.

She went on to star in films including Woody Allen’s Deconstructing Harry (1997) as Harry’s ex-wife Joan, and television shows, including starring in and producing the hit sitcom Veronica’s Closet (1997-2000), in which she played the insecure owner of a lingerie company and self-help empire wrestling with her fading looks and trying to hide the fact that her husband is a hopeless philanderer.

Even at the top of her game Kirstie Alley struggled with her weight and on several occasions was given ultimatums by network executives to lose it. But she kept on eating and by the early 2000s was out of a job, her weight having ballooned to 16 stone.

She found herself the subject of unflattering paparazzi shots showing her eating chips or coming out of fast-food restaurants and cruelly dubbed “the hefty heifer” by the American press. “I could look at myself a certain way and say, ‘Your waist is little,’ or ‘You look good from this angle,’ ” she told The Daily Telegraph in 2005. “But eventually I ran out of angles and then I was done for.’’

Refusing to give in to Hollywood’s strict demand for slimness, in 2004 she turned up at the offices of Showtime, the US premium television network, bearing a gift of 24 dozen Krispy Kreme doughnuts – the US “heart attack with a hole in the middle” – with a pitch for a bawdy television series charting the adventures of a semi-fictional Kirstie Alley, a former sex symbol whose once jaw-dropping figure expands in middle age.

She called the show Fat Actress. Broadcast in 2005 and mostly unscripted, against all odds and expectations, it became a cult hit in the US, was shown in Britain on FX and led to a showbusiness rebirth.

But behind all the comedy there was a poignancy to Kirstie Alley’s battle with her weight, while her ability to laugh at misfortune testified to a life marked by much personal heartache.

One of three children, Kirstie Louise Alley was born in Wichita, Kansas, on January 12 1951 to Robert Alley, who owned a lumber company, and his wife Lillian. When Kirstie was 30 her mother died in a car accident that left her father seriously injured.

Kirstie dropped out of university and spent a period as a biker before moving to Los Angeles and trying to make it as an interior designer. That career did not last long, as she developed a serious cocaine habit. “I snorted most of my earnings up my nose,” she recalled.

It was, she claimed, the Church of Scientology, which cured her of her coke habit. She had joined in 1979 and went through Narconon, a Scientology-affiliated drug treatment programme. She became a devoted adherent and would consult the church before accepting roles. She was reported to have refused cameo parts in the Cheers spin-off Frasier for religious reasons.

Kirstie Alley got her big break when she was cast as Vulcan Lieutenant Saavik in Star Trek II: The Wrath Of Khan (1982), and she went on to fill out a Playboy bunny costume in the 1985 movie A Bunny’s Tale, before replacing Shelley Long in Cheers.

Her other films included Village of the Damned (1995), a remake of the 1960 film of the same name, an adaptation of John Wyndham’s The Midwich Cuckoos, and Michael Patrick Jann’s satire Drop Dead Gorgeous, the 1999 beauty-pageant mockumentary in which she played the poisonously ambitious mother of one of the youthful contestants.

When Veronica’s Closet was axed in 2000, Kirstie Alley found lucrative parts in short supply, her most visible role before Fat Actress being as commercial spokeswoman for a low-price home furnishing store.

Kirstie Alley was married twice, first to her high-school sweetheart, Bob Alley (who bore the same surname but was unrelated), and secondly, in 1983, to Parker Stevenson, a former Baywatch beachboy, with whom she adopted two children.

After that marriage ended she dived into an affair with the actor James Wilder, eight years her junior, declaring herself “100 per cent certain” she had found the right man. But the relationship ended after three years in 1999 and by 2005 she was reported to be sharing her house with 30 pets, birds, cats and dogs, including four Welsh corgis.

She had, she told Oprah Winfrey that year, become “a born-again virgin”, having been celibate for four and a half years: “I don’t want to have fat sex. I have seen myself naked – I couldn’t believe it. And so I just was crushed.”

In later life Kirstie Alley made frequent appearances on reality TV shows, including finishing runner-up in the 2018 series of Britain’s Celebrity Big Brother. But in 2021 she complained in an interview with Fox News that she had been blackballed by Hollywood after announcing that she would be voting for Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential election.

She is survived by her daughter and son.

Kirstie Alley, born January 12 1951, died December 5 2022