“I could give you 1000 tries to guess how Kirstie Alley’s parents were dressed when they died in a car accident and you wouldn’t get it right.”
So said one person in a now-viral tweet, linking to footage of the Cheers and Look Who’s Talking actress recounting her parents’ deadly car accident in a 1992 TV interview with Barbara Walters.
The tweet is not entirely correct – a 1981 car crash involving a drunk driver did kill Alley’s mother while leaving her father seriously injured.
But the clip is still shocking: In it, Alley recounts learning the circumstances surrounding the accident, which occurred when her parents were on their way to a Halloween party.
When she arrived at the hospital, she asked her sister what her parents were dressed as. Her sister’s answer: “The Odd Couple.”
Confused, she asked her sister to be more specific.
“Well, mum was a black girl and dad was a Ku Klux Klan member,” she recalled, bursting into laughter.
“The whole family heard this conversation, and we all started laughing,” she told Walters. “It was the greatest tribute that you could give my mother.”
As expected, an incident from 1981, recounted in 1992, got one reaction when it resurfaced in 2024: Yikes.
“WHY WOULD YOU EVER ADMIT THIS,” the original poster asked under the video, which has been viewed more than 7 million times since it was posted yesterday.
“I didn’t see that coming,” another person tweeted.
“‘It was the greatest tribute you could give my mother?’ WHATTTT?” asked another.
“Probably one of the only people in history that can say ‘my mother died in black face’,” another person mused.
While Alley’s mother died in the crash, her father actually outlived her, dying in November last year aged 100.
Alley herself died a year earlier at the age of 71, following a short, private battle with stage 4 colon cancer.