‘The Facts of Life’: What Is Lisa Whelchel’s Net Worth?
Plenty of older TV shows have managed to stay in the public mind, rightfully earning themselves the title of classics. As new ways to consume entertainment bring these older series back into our lives through streaming services, we’re seeing a resurgence of nostalgia-based appreciation for these gems.
The Facts of Life is one of those series for which modern viewers have found a renewed audience. That’s also sparking questions about where the stars on the show ended up in the decades since its conclusion.
One of the leads on the series was Lisa Whelchel — who portrayed Blair Warner. What laid in store for Whelchel after The Facts of Life, and what is her current net worth?
‘The Facts of Life’ premiered in 1979
In 1979, The Facts of Life premiered on NBC and quickly found a dedicated audience in young girls who found themselves captivated by the story. The plot revolved around a boarding school — run by the maid from Diff’rent Strokes, the series from which the show was originally spun. The series focused on the lives of four girls who grew up over the nine seasons it was on the air. Eventually, they graduate and become business partners for their housemother.
As Entertainment Weekly reports, even the show’s director admits it was never “prestige” television, but it meant a lot to its fans: “even if you’d wanted to kill it, you couldn’t. They shifted it from one night to another night, from Wednesday to Saturday, but it had a tremendous fanbase—young girls, mostly—and they followed it. All of these girls would come to tapings, and they’d literally stomp the floor, they were so excited.”
One of those actors who had the young fans so excited was Lisa Whelchel, who played Blair Warner. She was on the series for its entire nine season run, which wrapped up in 1988.
‘The Facts of Life’ defined Lisa Whelchel’s career
While The Facts of Life was certainly a popular series and a launching pad for young Whelchel’s success, it was also rife with tension backstage. Early in its production, the show retooled to take a different direction, and most of the cast didn’t make the cut. Whelchel was one of the few who did survive the transition, and she’d continue on the series for its entire run.
Whelchel, who was only 16 years old during the first season, literally grew up on the show, and it became the defining role of her acting career.
As her IMDb biography explains, she married Steven Cauble — an associate pastor at the church she attended — just months after the final episode of The Facts of Life aired. She soon had three children and stepped out of the acting business for a long time. In the interim, she published many books about parenting. After 23 years of marriage, she divorced her husband in 2012, and it was shortly after that her acting career saw a resurgence.
Lisa Whelchel has revived her acting career
In 2013, Whelchel returned to acting with a part in A Madea Christmas. She followed it up with a string of TV movies, including a Christmas film that reunited her with fellow cast members from The Facts of Life. In 2020, she was cast as the host on the TV show Collector’s Call, which explored guests with interesting collections of memorabilia.
Interestingly, Whelchel also had a notable 2012 reality TV appearance when she participated in Season 25 of Survivor. She won a $100,000 prize after fans voted her the Spring Player of the Season by a very narrow margin.
Whelchel has no current projects listed as in the works on IMDb, but it seems clear that she’s intent on making a comeback.
According to Celebrity Net Worth, the star’s current net worth is $3 million.
