The Only Main Actor Still Alive From Mork & Mindy
It's likely most modern-day viewers know "Mork & Mindy" as the show that gave Robin Williams his first big break in show business. Over the course of four years and almost 100 episodes, Williams played the titular alien Mork, who is exiled from his humorless home planet of Ork and sent to Earth, where he meets a young woman from Boulder, Colorado, named Mindy (Pam Dawber) and quickly moves in with her family. The sitcom, which was one of many "Happy Days" spin-offs, ran from 1978 to 1982, and given that it's been over four decades since its last episode aired, several of the show's actors have since passed away.
Most notably, Williams died in August 2014, but there are many others, including Tom Poston, who played curmudgeonly neighbor Mr. Bickley, and Elizabeth Kerr, who portrayed Mindy's grandmother Cora, who are no longer with. us. In fact, there is only one individual from the main cast who is still alive at the time of writing, and it's Dawber, who also has the show to thank for her success as an actor.
Four years after "Mork & Mindy" ended, Dawber secured the titular role on another popular sitcom, CBS' "My Sister Sam," which ran from 1986 to 1988. Although she mostly stayed away from the camera after starring in several mostly made-for-TV movies in the '80s and '90s, she had a small-screen comeback in 2014, and it was on the last TV show Robin Williams starred in before his death.
Dawber and Williams briefly reunited on The Crazy Ones
After several years largely spent focusing on her family life with husband Mark Harmon and their two sons, Pam Dawber agreed to appear on Robin Williams' CBS sitcom "The Crazy Ones," which lasted just one season before its cancellation in May 2014. Although she only guested in one episode, playing a character named Lily, she welcomed the opportunity to reunite with her "Mork & Mindy" co-star, as she recalled in an interview with The A.V. Club. "I hadn't seen Robin in 20 years, and... I don't do episodic," she told the outlet. "I mean, I've obviously done it, but that was something I was never really interested in. But just to see Robin and work with him, and [longtime friend Bill D'Elia] was directing it, so all these pieces were good. And I liked what they wrote for me."
The actor also hinted at the possibility of her character returning in future episodes of "The Crazy Ones," but the series got axed by CBS just one month after her A.V. Club interview, and Williams' death later in 2014 meant his reunion with Dawber on the ill-fated sitcom marked their last time together on-screen. However, that wasn't Dawber's last notable TV comeback, as she joined her real-life hubby on "NCIS" and guested in Seasons 18 and 19 of the procedural as investigative journalist Marcie Warren.