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(1951– ). American actress.
Undiscouraged by
this rebuff, Alley—who had moved to Hollywood from Kansas in 1975 and spent
years working her way into the business—then provided solid performances in two
films of genre interest, Blind Date (1984) and Runaway (1985), before
becoming a regular on Cheers, again showing that she could effortlessly
join an established cast of characters and immediately have an impact. A year
after she first appeared on the show, she and other Cheers regulars
briefly entered the realm of fantasy by participating in the television special
Mickey's 60th Birthday (1988). But she still saw herself primarily as a
film actress and accordingly signed up to star in Look Who's Talking
(1989), a film about a baby magically dispensing cynical wisecracks with Bruce
WILLIS's voice that was far better than it should have been, primarily due to
the herculean efforts of Alley and co-star John TRAVOLTA to make their
characters seem grounded and appealing. Their rewards for their good work,
if one can call them that, were lucrative assignments to reprise their roles in
two inferior sequels, Look Who's Talking Too (1990) and Look Who's
Talking Now (1993), that no herculean efforts could uplift.
After Cheers
ended its run, it undoubtedly seemed like a good idea to appear in John
CARPENTER's remake of Village of the Damned (1995), but it wasn't:
working with the likes of Christopher REEVE was nothing like working with
Travolta, and the entire, wretched film seemingly damned all of its principals,
as Reeve was paralyzed in a horse-riding accident, Carpenter lost his status as
a star player in Hollywood, and Alley drifted toward oblivion, and obesity, in
a series of unheralded television movies, which remain her major avocation to
this day.
Still, Kirstie
Alley has never been one to let a few setbacks get her down, and she has
continued to make appearances on television, most recently in the horror series
Scream Queens (2015– ). And, while a return to science fiction films
appears unlikely at this point, there is still the possibility that some
enlightened soul, pondering novelties to include in the next Star Trek film,
might resolve to let bygones be bygones and ask Alley back to portray an older
Saavik, coming full circle to capably command a starship just as she did in the
very first scene of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.
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