45 Years Ago, Kirstie Alley’s Mother Died in Blackface on Her Way to a Halloween Party - VICE

On October 23, 1981, Cheers star Kirstie Alley’s mother, Lillian, was killed in a drunk-driving accident in Wichita, Kansas that also seriously injured her father, Robert. Kirstie was in Los Angeles at the time and rushed over to be with her sister and some other relatives as soon as she heard the news. As the two siblings sat in a hospital waiting room sobbing, Kirstie asked where their parents were heading when the tragedy occurred. “To a Halloween party,” the sister explained.

This only served to spark Kirstie’s curiosity further, and she inquired about what her mother and father were dressed as. “The Odd Couple,” Kirstie was told at first. “Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon?” she thought to herself, before pressing her sister on what exactly these “Odd Couple” costumes were. “Mom was a black girl, and Dad was a Ku Klux Klan member,” Kirstie’s sister clarified.

While recounting the story to Barbara Walters in 1996, Kirstie said that the revelation made her entire family burst out laughing. “And it was the greatest tribute that you could give my mother,” she recalled. Kirstie went on to say, “I really realized that through us she existed. You know, she would continue. And that she had left us with this wonderful sense of humor and this wonderful ability to laugh and cry at the same time.”

Kirstie touched on the subject again in her 2005 memoir How to Lose Your Ass and Regain Your Life, saying that she wished the woman responsible for her mother’s death—who apparently only spent a few months in jail—would’ve known what her mom was wearing that night. “[Because] maybe she, too, would know that my mother was a pretty funny person,” Kirstie wrote. Weirdly enough, the woman in question, Cherrie White, claimed she didn’t find out who she’d killed until decades after the fact.

Kirstie died from colon cancer in 2022. Her dad passed four months later, at the age of 99.