Cheers to that!
After a decade apart, Rhea Perlman is more than happy with her life after a very public separation from Danny DeVito.
The “Cheers” star, 74, looked back on her legendary Hollywood career and past marriage to the now 77-year-old actor. “[It] probably worked out for the best,” Perlman said in an interview with People. “Sometimes I wish we were still together because those were the glory days, but these are other kinds of glory days.”
Perlman and the “Terms of Endearment” star married in 1982 and share three children together: Lucy Chet, 39, Grace Fan, 37, and Jake Daniel, 34. They split in 2012, however, they never formally divorced and have no plans to do so.
” ’Cheers’ might have been everything in the beginning of my career, but family is everything — everything,” Perlman explained. “If my relationships with my children were strained, I would be beside myself.”
Despite living a life apart, the four-time Emmy winner and “Pearl” star cherishes her new normal and relationship with her one-time real life leading man. “We’re still separated, but we see each other often, and we’re still a family. We can do things together, we can do things separately. I’m really, really glad that Danny and I were able to navigate some rough days to be able to have this different kind of relationship,” she went on. “I think it’s pretty rare, but we agree on so many things that it makes sense.”
The Coney Island native opened up to The Post in 2018 about why she won’t divorce DeVito any time soon.
“We’ve been together a very long time, so there’s a lot of love and history,” she said. “We agree on enough things, so why [ruin] that with the yucky things that come with a divorce?”
Perlman was thrust into the limelight with her hilarious portrayal of a very fertile but sarcastic waitress, Carla Tortelli in NBC’s “Cheers” from 1982 until 1993.
The sitcom about a group of friends who spend all their time in a bar in Boston also starred icons Ted Danson, Shelley Long, Nicholas Colasanto, Kirstie Alley, George Wendt, John Ratzenberger, Kelsey Grammer and Woody Harrelson.
Perlman stated to People that the show was “huge,” and she had “the best job in the world.”
“I remember we were all going, ‘Should we do another year? It’s been 11 years?’ ” the Emmy winner remembered. “George [Wendt] says, ‘If someone gives you a present every year, you’re not going to take it the next year? Why not?’ So, we took it for as long as they gave it.”
