Jill Jacobson, the actress best known for her roles in “Falcon Crest” and “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” has died. She was 70.
Jacobson passed away Dec. 8 in Los Angeles after a battle with “a long illness,” her friend and publicist, Daniel Harary, confirmed to Variety on Sunday.
Her family said in a statement, “Beautiful, energetic, and positive to the end, she will be deeply missed by numerous relatives, friends, and her beloved dogs Benny and Kowalsk.”
Jacobson’s manager, Ben Padua, told Entertainment Weekly, “We are incredibly sad to say goodbye to our beautiful, soulful, hysterically funny, elegantly raunchy client, Jill Jacobson. Jill was a total spitfire of an actress with comedic timing straight out of a Marx Brothers’ flick and Hollywood glamor right from its golden age. Jill took us on so many adventures and she was an absolute blast. Thank you, Jill. We’ll see you in our dreams.”
Jacobson revealed on “The Jim Masters Show” in September that she battled esophageal cancer for two and a half years.
“It’s been a secret. Kind of took me out of the game for a while,” she shared. “It was esophageal cancer. It took like two, two and a half years of treatment.”
The actress added, “What I went through was pretty intense. You can’t function, you just can’t function. And now I’m so grateful, I just want to keep going, I want to help people. It makes you want to help people.”
Jacobson grew up in Texas and attended the University of Texas in Austin, where she received a B.S. in Radio, TV and Film Performance. After graduating, she moved to Los Angeles to pursue her acting career.
Her first acting appearance was in the 1977 supernatural horror film “Nurse Sherri.”
Jacobson went on to appear in the shows “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” “Star Trek: Deep Space Nine,” “War of the Worlds,” “Quantum Leap,” “Newhart,” “Who’s the Boss?,” “Murphy Brown,” “Days of Our Lives” and “Castle.”
From 1985 to 1987, she played Erin Jones on 22 episodes of “Falcon Crest.”
The CBS soap opera, which followed a feuding wealthy family in California, also starred Jane Wyman, Robert Foxworth, Susan Sullivan, Lorenzo Lamas, David Selby and Abby Dalton. It aired for nine seasons from 1981 to 1990.
“Falcon Crest is one of those great, great times,” Jacobson said in an interview in 2008.
“It didn’t get the same attention that some of the others got,” she added. “It had some great actors, it was fun.”
Jacobson also played Larue Wilson on 8 episodes of the sitcom “The New Gidget” in the 1980s. The show was a sequel to the Sally Field series “Gidget.”
The actress said in the 2008 interview that she loved working on “Falcon Crest” and “The New Gidget” because “they were completely different characters.”
In addition to her acting roles, Jacobson performed stand-up comedy at The Improv and The Comedy Store in LA.
The late star also did volunteer work with the American Cancer Society.
