Kirstie Alley: Dancing Queen
When Kirstie Alley stepped into the lead female spot on the hit sitcom Cheers, her fearless, bawdy, neurotic energy thwarted all predictions that she'd never fill Shelley Long's shoes. She even earned an Emmy. Since then, Alley has continued to catch the world off guard by segueing into feature films, both arty and mainstream (Deconstructing Harry, the Look Who's Talking movies), headlining popular post-Cheers series Veronica's Closet and making a name for herself as one of the most unapologetic of Scientology's brethren. Then, when her weight ballooned at age 53, she used her indomitable spirit to turn her bathroom-scale struggles into a new branch of her career: She's been a Jenny Craig spokesperson; invented her own weight-loss program, Organic Liaison; starred in a semiautobiographical Showtime sitcom, Fat Actress; and to show what it's like to be an overweight celebrity single mom of two teenagers — William True and Lillie Price — she welcomed a reality-TV crew into her hectic home for A&E's Kirstie Alley's Big Life.
