Kirstie Alley was celebrated not because she was flawless – but because her flaws were so visible

It was an impressively shocking moment in the hit sitcom Cheers when actor Kirstie Alley opened her mouth to reveal her tongue gripping a lit cigarette – in one short, catlike movement, she expertly flipped it over, caught it between her teeth and sunk in to a satisfied puff of smoke. In the scene, Alley is wearing a pink turtleneck beneath a pink coat sporting big, 80s shoulders, the whole moment conjuring the feeling of the alpha bad girl taking a surreptitious smoke break in the ladies’ room.

That moment sums up a lot about the unique personality that Alley brought to Cheers and the decades of acting and celebrity that would follow as she hewed out a persona that was compelling in its complexity.

Although by the time Alley arrived at Cheers in 1987 she had already developed a reputation with roles in the films Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan and Runaway, it was in the hit Boston sitcom that Alley reached stardom, winning an Emmy for her portrayal of neurotic businesswoman Rebecca Howe. She boldly stepped into the absence made by the departure of lead actress Shelley Long, establishing herself as a force in her own right and giving the show a new lease on life.

Alley’s Howe emanated a roughness and wildness beneath the surface of a highly polished, if undeniably maladjusted femininity – in that, it very much resembled Alley’s infamous Emmys speech, where she offered a disjointed, bawdy series of remarks that felt as sincere and joyful as they did boundary-pushing and inappropriate.

Kirstie Alley and her husband Parker Stevenson at the Golden Globe awards in 1991 in Los Angeles. Photograph: Barry King/Alamy

As her career grew, Alley moved beyond Cheers to star in popular movies like the Look Who’s Talking trilogy, as well as becoming the lead character in the the sitcom Veronica’s Closet, where she played the owner of a company selling racy lingerie and other things to be enjoyed in the bedroom. Projects such as these continued building her trajectory as an actor willing to push her sex appeal into edgy territory, while also letting her shine as an anxiety-ridden everywoman who just wants to find a good man and fall in love.

Much as with the fictional characters she depicted, in her personal life Alley very publicly went her own way. She credited her affiliation with the Church of Scientology for helping her overcome a serious cocaine addiction, and in the church she ultimately reached the status of Operating Thetan Level 8, an extremely high rank costing millions of dollars to obtain. She also courted controversy in her affiliation with candidate Donald Trump, pledging then retracting her support for him in the 2016 presidential election, ultimately declaring in October 2020 that she had voted for him once and planned to do so again. Amid all the scrutiny of her Trump ties, it was less remembered that Alley also voted for Barack Obama twice.

Alley had a similarly on-again, off-again relationship with the weight loss company Jenny Craig, first operating as a spokesperson, then departing from the company and starting her own weight-loss enterprise, Organic Liaison, then eventually selling that company to Jenny Craig and resuming spokesperson duties. Just as her relationship with Jenny Craig went back and forth, so did her weight: on Oprah in 2005, she very publicly castigated herself for weighing too much, then returned to that show a year later modelling a bikini, her weight continuing to very publicly yo-yo for a decade afterwards.

Kirstie Alley in the 2005 Showtime series Fat Actress. Photograph: Showtime/Kobal/Rex/Shutterstock

Along the way Alley turned her calorie angst into a mordant, unscripted, semi-autobiographical Showtime series called Fat Actress, a very prototypical move for her. Alley’s shoot-from-the-hip stance and high-profile battles with her demons were things that resonated with fans, as was her reputation for having a big heart and not putting on airs. While Alley’s support for Trump or her many incendiary, expletive-laden tweets were often divisive (Alley claimed that her Trump votes got her blackballed by Hollywood), it’s telling that Jenny Craig never pulled her back as a spokesperson and that her death occasioned an outpouring of fond remembrances, even from those she had feuded with.

Alley was so widely celebrated not because she was flawless but because her flaws were so visible – she was among those celebrities who are compelling because they eschew the carefully managed image of the famous in favour of offering something that feels completely unfiltered and thus far more intimate.

It was this sense of unscripted intimacy that she brought to her best roles and that defined her as an actor, letting her inhabit her characters with a forcefulness bordering on swagger. Alley achieved prominence at a time when actors like Roseanne Barr and Rosie O’Donnell courted controversy in large part by defying sexist expectations of how a female celebrity should come off in public life, and how she should portray characters in film and TV.

If some of Alley’s stances now feel retrograde or even cringe-inducing, they are reflective of the degree to which the forces that forged her as an actor swallowed her up. Right till the end, Alley presented a picture of an individual actively working to heal herself amid a painful, difficult search for peace.