What The Cast Of Who's The Boss? Is Doing Today
For eight seasons between 1984 and 1992, Who's the Boss? separated itself from the pack of classic sitcoms of the era with its unique (especially for the time) premise. The series starred Tony Danza, then best known for his work on the iconic series Taxi, as Tony Micelli, a former Major League Baseball star whose career-ending injury drives him into a new role: Live-in housekeeper for Angela, a divorced Connecticut advertising executive portrayed by stage actor Judith Light. Accompanied by his precocious young daughter Samantha — played by a very young Alyssa Milano in her first major role — Tony joins Angela and her young son Jonathan, played by Danny Pintauro, frequently butting heads with his employer and her free-spirited mother Mona, portrayed by veteran actress Katherine Helmond.
Of course, the relationship between Tony and Angela was one of the great "will they or won't they" dynamics of '80s television, and by the final season, they finally admitted to having feelings for each other (although it still wasn't clear who was the boss). At the conclusion of the series, after briefly moving back to Iowa for a great new job, Tony moves back to Connecticut to be with Angela. What happened after that, we don't know, but we will soon, thanks to a sequel series that's now in the works from Sony Pictures Television, with Danza and Milano (so far) both reprising their roles (via CNN).
With Who's the Boss? heading back to TV screens, we thought it would be a good time to check in with the main cast to see what they've been up to in the nearly three decades since the original called it quits. Here's what the cast of Who's the Boss? is doing today.
Tony Danza has remained a steady presence in TV and film
After the run of Who's the Boss, Danza remained a fixture on the small screen, appearing in a number of TV movies throughout the '90s and briefly headlining his own sitcom, The Tony Danza Show, in late 1997. Unfortunately, that series proved to be ill-conceived, and only five episodes were aired out of 14 shot, but its title would later be used for a more successful show of a completely different type.
In 2004, Danza landed his own syndicated daytime talk show, also called The Tony Danza Show, which ran for a whopping 330 episodes. Danza's gregarious personality was a good fit for the talk format, but despite a fan campaign to save the show, slipping ratings caused it to be canceled in 2006. Danza, however, landed on his nimble feet (he's a trained tap dancer), snagging the role of Max Bialystock in the acclaimed Broadway play The Producers.
Danza has also appeared in guest roles in a slew of popular series from The Practice to Family Law to Family Guy, and he's also popped up on the big screen early and often. He was featured in a small role in 2004's Crash, that year's winner of the Academy Award for Best Picture, and in 2013 he starred in the romantic dramedy Don Jon, the directorial debut of Joseph Gordon-Leavitt. Next year, you can catch him in a voice role opposite Will Arnett and Terry Crews in the Paramount Animation feature Rumble.
Judith Light has balanced activism with continued stardom
Light was no stranger to the stage or to LGBTQ+ activism before Who's the Boss?, and after the series ended, she continued in both endeavors. While starring in a slew of TV movies in the '90s, she continued to advocate for the rights of the LGBTQ+ community, joining the boards of both the Matthew Shepard Foundation and the Point Foundation. In 1999, she returned to the stage in Wit, a Pulitzer Prize-winning play in which she starred as Dr. Vivian Bearing, a professor dealing with stage four ovarian cancer.
From 2006 to 2010, Light starred on the acclaimed series Ugly Betty, for which she was nominated for a Primetime Emmy Award in 2007, but this distinguished entry on her resume still seemed to be a mere stopover on her way back to the stage. In 2010, she joined the Broadway cast of Lombardi, which scored her a Tony Award nod. She then hopped down the street to star in Other Desert Cities in 2011, which landed Light her first Tony win. Her second came just two years later, when she bagged the hardware for her role in The Assembled Parties.
Light's craft finally collided with her activism in 2014, when she joined the cast of Amazon's dark comedy Transparent, which dealt with the coming out of a family patriarch (Jeffrey Tambor) as trans. More stage and screen credits followed, including a role in the FX anthology The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story in 2018 and Netflix's The Politician in 2019. That year, she finally received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame — an honor that, if you ask us, was just a tad bit overdue.
Alyssa Milano stays busy in Hollywood while advocating for women's rights
Milano is perhaps the most visible member of the Who's the Boss? cast today, and a rare example of an actor who transitioned successfully from being a child star to having a successful, decades-long career in Hollywood. After appearing in a number of B-movies in the '90s — a move calculated to counter her good-girl image — Milano returned to the upper echelon of TV stardom in 1997, appearing as Jennifer Mancini on the hit primetime soap Melrose Place. She followed that up with the lead role on the supernatural drama Charmed, on which she starred from 1998 to 2006.
Since then, she's popped up in minor features and in a slew of guest spots on TV in shows like Castle, Breaking In, and Grey's Anatomy, and has been featured in main roles on the ABC drama Mistresses and Netflix's dark comedy Insatiable. Like Light, she also caught the activism bug very early in her career. In the '80s, while still starring on Who's the Boss?, she appeared on Donahue with Ryan White — the young boy who made headlines by contracting HIV via blood transfusion — and kissed him in order to prove that the disease couldn't be spread by casual contact.Her activist streak has held up into recent years, as she began a blog dedicated to exposing poverty and poor infrastructure in neglected countries, vocally endorsed presidential candidate Bernie Sanders in 2015, and fired off the tweet that launched the #MeToo movement into the social media stratosphere in 2017.
Milano most recently appeared in the 2018 romantic comedy Little Italy, and in the coming months, you'll be able to catch her on the Quibi comedy series The Now, directed by the Farrelly Brothers and co-starring Daryl Hannah, Dave Franco, and O'Shea Jackson, Jr.
Danny Pintauro has overcome a rough adulthood after child stardom
Out of the entire main cast of Who's the Boss?, the only one to basically disappear from show business after the series' run was Danny Pintauro. He appeared in a couple minor stage productions and in a "child stars" episode of The Weakest Link in 2001, but otherwise, his first major credit after Who's the Boss? ended came in 2006, when he popped up in a small role in the little-seen drama The Still Life.
A couple minor TV roles followed in 2010, but Pintauro reclaimed the spotlight in 2015 when he appeared on an episode of Oprah Winfrey's reality documentary series Oprah: Where Are They Now? In it, he revealed that he had struggled with his public image after coming out as gay in the late '90s, and that he had been HIV-positive since 2003 as a result of an unsafe encounter he blamed on a worsening methamphetamine addiction. Fortunately, Pintauro was able to pull himself back from that brink, and today, he is healthy, married to his longtime partner Wil Tabares, and nursing his lifelong dream of opening a bed and breakfast while working a day job as a restaurant manager (via Huffington Post). He's also starting to dabble in showbiz again — he's appeared along with a gang of fellow actors on the YouTube web series The Quarantine Bunch, and he also popped up in the YouTube dramedy series Unsure/Positive.
Katherine Helmond kept busy with Cars in her later years
Helmond was familiar to audiences long before Who's the Boss?. She had starred in feature films such as Alfred Hitchcock's Family Plot and Terry Gilliam's Time Bandits and Brazil, and she was probably best-known for her role as Jessica Tate on the long-running comedy series Soap. After Who's the Boss?, she took a bit of a hiatus from screens large and small, appearing only in a couple of cameos in the features Inside Monkey Zetterland and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, before returning for recurring stints on the comedy series Coach and Everybody Loves Raymond (the latter of which earned her an Emmy nod for Outstanding Guest Actress in a Comedy Series).
The remainder of her small-screen work consisted of a couple of TV movies and a handful of guest spots, but in the twilight of her career, her main gig was a bit of a surprising one: Pixar fans may recognize her distinctive voice as that of Lizzie, the widow of Radiator Springs founder Stanley in 2006's Cars and its two sequels. Sadly, Helmond passed away from complications of Alzheimer's disease in 2019, at the age of 89.