Woodrow Tracy Harrelson was born on July 23, 1961, in Midland, Texas. That makes him 65 today.
(You may see posts today announcing his 68th. They’re wrong. The birth year is 1961, firmly, which puts the number at 65.)
Sixty-five is one of those ages that invites a look back, and in his case the look back starts with the single most thankless job in American television.
It was 1985. Cheers was going into its fourth season and it was, by then, the show. A bar in Boston where the whole country felt like a regular. And the cast had lost Nicholas Colasanto, who had died, and whose bartender the audience adored.
Into that walked a 24-year-old from Texas that nobody had heard of.
Think about what that assignment actually is. You are the unknown quantity standing behind a bar that millions of people already think of as theirs, in a room full of actors who have been working together for three years, following a man the audience is still grieving. There is no version of that where the crowd is on your side at the start. The best you can hope for is to be tolerated for a season while everyone gets used to it.
The audience didn’t tolerate him. The audience took to him almost immediately.
Woody Boyd was a farm kid, sweet-natured and slow on the uptake and entirely without malice, and Harrelson played him without a single wink at the camera. That’s the part that’s hard. Innocent characters curdle fast when the actor lets you see him being clever about it. Harrelson never did. He just stood there pouring drinks and meaning every word, and the joke landed every time because he wasn’t in on it.
Four years later he had a Primetime Emmy for it. Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Comedy Series, 1989. He was nominated five times for the role.
He stayed to the end. Cheers ran eleven seasons, from 1982 to 1993, and Harrelson was there for the last eight of them, right through to the finale.
Then he did the thing sitcom actors are told is close to impossible, which is walk out of a beloved comedy and be taken seriously in film.
Three Academy Award nominations followed. Best Actor for The People vs. Larry Flynt in 1996. Best Supporting Actor for The Messenger in 2009. Best Supporting Actor again for Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri in 2017. Twenty-one years between the first nomination and the third, which tells you it wasn’t a fluke or a phase. Three separate generations of Academy voters looked at his work and put his name on the list.
Not a bad run for the bartender.
The other thread of his life started in that same bar, more or less. He met Laura Louie in 1987, in the middle of the Cheers years, when she was working as his assistant. They were together a long time before they made it official. Three daughters arrived first, born in 1993, 1996 and 2006. The wedding came in 2008, twenty-one years after they met.
Twenty-one years from the first day she picked up his phone to the day they signed the papers. By the standards of the industry he works in, that is a partnership that took its time and then held.
And here is the part that has quietly become the warmest chapter of the whole story.
In June 2024, roughly thirty years after Cheers signed off, Harrelson and Ted Danson started a podcast together. It’s called Where Everybody Knows Your Name, and the premise is exactly what the title promises: the two of them sitting down, bringing on guests, and going back through the show and the people in it.
Thirty years. That’s the detail worth stopping on. Two men who worked together on a soundstage in the eighties, who then went off and had two enormous and completely separate careers, and who apparently still want to spend a couple of hours a week talking to each other.
Most former co-stars manage a reunion panel and a fond quote in an interview. These two built a standing weekly appointment out of it.
They turn up together elsewhere, too. On March 1, 2026, at the 32nd Screen Actors Guild Awards, broadcast live on Netflix, there they were again, side by side in front of a room full of actors, four decades on from the bar.
So: 65 today. Emmy on the shelf, three Oscar nominations behind him, three grown daughters, a wife he met when she was answering his phones in 1987, and a podcast where he and his old friend go back and tell the same stories they’ve been telling each other since the eighties.
The kid from Midland walked into the most beloved sitcom on television with everything stacked against him, and he walked out of it eight seasons later with the audience firmly on his side. Everything since has been the long tail of that particular piece of nerve.
Happy 65th to him.
