Kirstie Alley’s character on the long-running American sitcom Cheers was conceived as a sexy, but cold-hearted quasi-villain, forever rebuffing charmer Ted Danson’s advances, but the writers took on board the actress’s own neuroses and bar manager Rebecca Howe turned out much more sympathetic.

The show launched in 1982 and by the time Alley joined it had already been running for five seasons, with Shelley Long as Danson’s original co-star. It was a hard act to follow, but the chemistry – or rather, lack of chemistry – between Alley and Danson’s characters proved equally popular with audiences.

Between 1987 and the series finale in 1993 Alley appeared in 147 episodes. She won an Emmy and Golden Globe and was making $150,000 a week on the show, but that was dwarfed by her earnings on the hit movie comedy Look Who’s Talking and its sequels.

Kirstie Alley at a film premiere in 2010 in New York (Picture: Bryan Bedder/Getty Images)

That funded a lavish lifestyle for her and actor husband Parker Stevenson, with chefs and security guards living on site at their Los Angeles mansion, and second and third homes in Oregon and Maine.

But Alley was never really part of the Hollywood set. Not only was she a Scientologist – like Tom Cruise, but she was also a Trump supporter – on and off, and on again. She criticised the Oscars for the Academy’s positive action on supporting diversity, which she believed limited artistic freedom.

And her weight continually attracted bitchy comments and tabloid attention. She was the public face of a weight loss and nutrition company, but had to pay out $130,000 after legal action was launched against her for claims that she lost 100lb as a result of weight loss products when she was in fact in training for Dancing with the Stars, the US version of Strictly Come Dancing.

She was born in Wichita, Kansas, in 1951. It seems she was originally Kirsten Louise Deal, though many newspapers suggest that Alley was her surname at birth, which would be an odd coincidence as Alley was also the surname of the man she married in her teens. Birth records are not public in Kansas, so there is no ready way of checking.

Her father owned a timber company. She was a rebellious youngster and was still in her teens when she married her high school sweetheart Bob Alley. They divorced in 1977.

She went to Kansas State University, but never finished her studies, and worked as an interior designer before moving to Los Angeles and breaking into movies. She also became addicted to cocaine and credited the Church of Scientology’s treatment programme with getting her off it.

Acting lessons led to a role in a very low-budget film called One More Chance. Few saw it, but it was enough to get her an audition for Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, on which she landed the major supporting role as a Starfleet officer, Lieutenant Saavik, Mr Spock’s protégé, complete with Vulcan ears.

Alley had done three auditions and was due at a fourth when her mother was killed and her father seriously injured by a drunk driver. The fourth audition was postponed, but she got the part and was able to draw on her recent loss for scenes at Spock’s funeral, at which her character’s tears caused some division on set.

Director Nicholas Meyer said someone asked him “ ‘Are you going to let her do that?’ And I said, 'Yeah', and they said, 'But Vulcans don't cry,' and I said, 'Well, that's what makes this such an interesting Vulcan’.”

Arguments over pay meant Alley did not reprise the role in subsequent films. But she worked fairly steadily in the five years between Wrath of Khan and Cheers, which was the show that turned her into a genuine star.

Producer Glen Charles, explained how Alley’s own personality softened the supposedly chilly character of Rebecca. “Kirstie was so nervous the first few weeks that we thought, why not use all those little neurotic tinges beneath the self-containment.” Alley talked of how she accidentally redefined the role with her instinctive clumsiness. “I would run into doors and trip in real life, and they would write it in,” she said.

Look Who’s Talking came out in the middle of her time on Cheers. It was a charming comedy with the novel idea of a baby that speaks, even before birth – with the voice of Bruce Willis and the wit of good Hollywood scriptwriters.

Alley later described another Hollywood Scientologist, John Travolta, as the “greatest love” of her life, though she was married at the time to Parker Stevenson, one of the stars of Baywatch, and she said she never acted upon her feelings. “Believe me, it took everything that I had, inside, outside, whatever, to not run off and marry John – and be with John for the rest of my life,” she said

The sequels Look Who’s Talking Too and Look Who’s Talking Now followed in quick succession and Alley won a second Emmy in 1994 as a single mother with an autistic son in the television drama David’s Mother.

But later work failed to maintain the momentum of Cheers and Look’s Who Talking, with more attention being paid to her yoyoing weight and problems in her personal life, including an acrimonious divorce from Stevenson.

A shortlived American sitcom called Fat Actress allowed her to play a fictionalised version of herself in 2005.

And she was “Baby Mammoth” in the American version of The Masked Singer earlier this year. She was on several reality television shows, including the British version of Celebrity Big Brother in 2018, in which she came second to Ryan Thomas from Coronation Street.

It was discovered only recently that she had colon cancer. Kirstie Alley is survived by the two children she adopted with Stevenson.

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Scotsman Obituaries: Kirstie Alley, actress who starred in TV sitcom Cheers