From Fame to Mystery: What Happened to the 25 Biggest Stars of the 70s?

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Comedy series The Mary Tyler Moore Show was one of the biggest series of the 1970s, earning a staggering 29 Emmy Awards over its run from 1970–79. Already a well-known star, thanks to her role in the early Dick Van Dyke Show in the 1960s, Moore remained a major star after the show was over too, picking up an Oscar nomination for Ordinary People in 1980, three Tony Awards in across the 1980s, and another Emmy for her role as an orphanage director in Stolen Babies in the early 1990s. She died in 2017, at the age of 80. 

OLIVIA NEWTON-JOHN 

British-born Australian actress and singer Olivia Newton-John made her film debut in the mid 1960s, but became a global superstar thanks to her breakout role as Sandy in 1978’s Grease. Throughout the decades that followed, she continued to work as an actress, pop superstar (her 1981 hit “Physical” was Billboard’s highest-ranking Hot 100 single of the decade), author, philanthropist, and cancer research activist. Diagnosed with breast cancer in 1992, she spent the next 30 years campaigning for innovative cancer research and channelling enormous sums of money from her book and record sales into establishing The Olivia Newton-John Cancer Wellness & Research Centre in Melbourne. Her efforts, and dual citizenship, earned her the rare honor of both a damehood and the Order of Australia. Having previously beaten the disease twice before, Newton-John died of cancer in 2022, at the age of 73. 

BURT REYNOLDS 

Burt Reynolds ranked alongside Robert Redford as one of the 1970s’ biggest box office draws, with blockbuster roles in the likes of Smokey and the Bandit and Deliverance. Having made his film debut in 1961, Reynolds continued acting throughout the 70s, 80s, 90s, and 2000s, even earning a late-career Oscar nomination for his role in Boogie Nights in 1997. He died in 2018 at the age of 82. 

GEORGE C. SCOTT 

Legendary actor George C. Scott made history in 1970, when he famously declined the Best Actor Oscar for his role in Patton, claiming actors’ performances cannot be compared to one another. The role was the highlight of Scott’s four-decade film career, as he never quite matched the same high in his movie roles in the 80s and 90s. But as his roles in front of the camera dwindled, Scott returned to the theatre and picked up a record fifth Tony Award for Inherit the Wind, just three years before his death in 1999 at the age of 71.

CARLY SIMON 

Born in New York in 1943, Carly Simon dominated the popular music charts in the 1970s, with a string of hits including “Anticipation,” global chart-topper “You’re So Vain,” and “Nobody Does It Better (the theme to the 1977 Bond movie The Spy Who Loved Me).” Now in her 80s, she continues to write and perform new music, releasing her twenty-fourth album, Comes in Waves, to critical acclaim in 2026. 

DAVID SOUL 

Beginning his screen career in the 1960s, David Soul’s big break came in the mid 1970s when he was cast as Sergeant “Hutch” Hutchinson in TV’s Starsky & Hutch, opposite Paul Michael Glaser. Soul accompanied his television career with an equally successful career as a pop star, scoring a worldwide Number 1 in 1976 with Don’t Give Up On Us. He memorably rounded out the decade with a lead role in the original miniseries adaptation of Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot in 1979. A string of smaller roles in TV and film in the 1980s led to Soul relocating to the UK in the 1990s, where he began a long career on the West End and on British television. He died in London in 2024, at the age of 80. 

SISSY SPACEK 

Sissy Spacey earned the first of her six career Oscar nominations for her breakout role in Carrie in 1976 (winning four years later for The Coal Miner’s Daughter), and quickly became one of the decade’s biggest movie stars. She has continued to act ever since, often in equally challenging roles; her most recent Oscar nomination was for her role as a grieving mother consumed with revenge in Todd Field’s In the Bedroom in 2001. Roles in film and television have continued long into the 2010s and 2020s—and in 2018, she even memorably appeared opposite David Strathiirn in the “devastating” video for LCD Sound System’s hit “Oh Baby.”

LORETTA SWIT 

Alan Alda’s M*A*S*H co-star Loretta Swit played Major Margaret “Hot Lips” Houlihan in the show, earning an Emmy Award nomination for every single season (winning two, in 1980 and 1982). Having started her career on stage, Swit returned to the theatre in the decades after M*A*S*H, in particular starring in a long-running tour of Willy Russell’s award-winning one-woman play, Shirley Valentine, from the 1990s to 2000s. She died in 2025 at the age of 87. 

RICHARD THOMAS