Markie Post Net Worth: Night Court Star's $12 Million Estate

Markie Post had a net worth of about $12 million at the time of her death on August 7, 2021, according to Celebrity Net Worth (checked September 2026). The figure rests mainly on more than 40 years of steady network television work, led by seven seasons as public defender Christine Sullivan on NBC's Night Court, and on a Los Angeles home that rose sharply in value over three decades.

She was 70 and had been living with cancer for three years and ten months, her family said in a statement reported by NBC News. No probate filing or official accounting of her estate has been published, so the $12 million number is an outside estimate, not a disclosed total.

Where the money came from

Post was a working television actress first and last. Her income came from a handful of clear streams:

• Series-regular roles. She was a main cast member on four network shows: ABC's The Fall Guy (65 episodes, 1982 to 1985), NBC's Night Court (159 episodes, 1985 to 1992), CBS's Hearts Afire (1992 to 1995) and ABC's Odd Man Out (1999 to 2000). Episode counts come from Deadline. Regular roles on network prime time were the best-paid jobs in TV acting during those years, and she held one almost without a break for 13 seasons.
• Recurring and guest work. She had multi-episode arcs on Scrubs (as the mother of Sarah Chalke's Dr. Elliot Reid), The District, Chicago P.D. (Bunny Fletcher, 2014 to 2017) and The Kids Are Alright (2018 to 2019), plus dozens of one-off guest spots.
• TV movies. After Hearts Afire she made a long run of television films, including Holiday in Handcuffs and, while in chemotherapy, a Lifetime Christmas movie.
• Feature films. Her best-known big-screen part was Mary's mother in the 1998 Farrelly brothers comedy There's Something About Mary.
• Voice work and game shows. She voiced June Darby on the animated series Transformers: Prime and was a frequent celebrity player on Super Password and the Pyramid shows, according to Wikipedia.
• Real estate. The single largest reported asset was the family home, covered below.

None of the sources we checked reports her per-episode salary on any show, so this article does not guess at one. Residuals from syndicated reruns of Night Court and The Fall Guy would also have added income over the years, but no outlet has put a number on them.

Career timeline

Post was born Marjorie Armstrong Post on November 4, 1950, in Palo Alto, California. Her father, Richard F. Post, was a physicist and her mother, Marylee, a poet. She grew up in Stanford and Walnut Creek and earned a bachelor's degree from Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon, after a short spell at Pomona College.

Unusually for an actress, she started behind the camera. She worked on the production crew of the game show Split Second, was an associate producer on CBS's Double Dare and dealt the cards on NBC's Card Sharks. That grounding in how TV was made fed straight into a career built almost entirely on television.

Night Court was the role that defined her. The Associated Press obituary carried by NPR describes Christine as the steady foil to John Larroquette's prosecutor Dan Fielding and the long-running would-be love interest of Harry Anderson's Judge Harry Stone. The show's later years in syndication kept her face on screens long after it ended in 1992.

She kept working through illness. Her family told reporters that she treated acting as something to keep doing between chemotherapy sessions, and her final credits came in the years after her diagnosis.

Recent changes (2025–2026)

There has been no new financial news about Post's estate in 2025 or 2026. Her name has come up mainly in retrospectives: Just Jared included her in roundups of One Chicago cast members who have died, published in November 2025 and January 2026, and Google Trends shows search interest in her peaked in early December 2025 before settling at a lower, steady level through September 2026. NBC's Night Court revival, which was in development when she died, has also kept the original cast in the news.

Assets

The best-documented asset is the family house. According to Celebrity Net Worth, Post and her husband, writer and producer Michael A. Ross, paid a little over $1 million in 1991 for a home in Toluca Lake, a Los Angeles neighborhood.

The same source reports that the house was listed in February 2022, about six months after her death, at $6.275 million, and sold in August 2022 for $5.8 million. That is roughly a fivefold gain on the purchase price over 31 years, and on its own it accounts for close to half of the $12 million estimate.

Beyond the house, no source reports business stakes, other property or investments. Any remaining wealth would have been held jointly with Ross, who survived her along with their daughters, actress Kate Armstrong Ross and Daisy Schoenborn, as Deadline reported.

Net worth compared

Set against her Night Court co-stars and her Hearts Afire partner, Post's estimated estate sits near the top of the group. All figures below are Celebrity Net Worth estimates at each person's death or latest update:

The gap between Post and Anderson, the show's lead, likely reflects property more than pay: her Toluca Lake sale alone came close to Anderson's entire estimated worth. For other sitcom and TV careers on this site, see Ray Romano, Linda Blair, another actress whose peak came in the 1970s and 1980s, and George Lopez.

How the $12 million figure was reached

Celebrity Net Worth does not publish its working, and no court filing, will or estate accounting for Post has been made public. What can be checked is this: the Toluca Lake house sold for $5.8 million, and she held regular or recurring network roles almost every year from 1982 to 2019. An estimate of $12 million is consistent with a paid-off house near $6 million plus savings from a long television career, but that split is our reading of the public facts, not something any source states.

Several things make any figure uncertain:

• No salary data. None of the outlets we checked published her pay per episode on Night Court or any other show.
• Joint assets. The house and other savings were shared with her husband of nearly four decades, so it is unclear how much counts as "her" net worth.
• Medical costs. She was treated for cancer for almost four years; how much that cost is private.
• Low-quality copies. Many pages ranking for this search repeat the $12 million figure without a source, and at least one confuses her with the widow of singer John Denver. Post was never married to Denver. Her husbands were Stephen Knox and Michael A. Ross.

Sources also differ on small biographical details. Wikipedia dates her first marriage, to college friend Stephen Knox, to 1971 to 1972, while Celebrity Net Worth gives 1971 to 1982. Wikipedia's date is the one backed by a citation, and it fits her marriage to Ross in 1982.