The actor who played Balki Bartokomous has not been publicly linked to anyone since 1997. Lately he has started to say why.
Bronson Pinchot has never married, and at 67 he is not dating anyone. The actor, who earned an Emmy nomination for playing Balki Bartokomous on Perfect Strangers, has no wife and no children, and he has not been publicly linked to a partner since his engagement to director Amy Heckerling ended in 1997.
He spent years waving the question off with a joke. More recently he has spoken plainly about a hard childhood and the long depression that ran alongside his fame.
Table of Contents
Bronson Pinchot’s past relationships
His public dating record is short. In the mid 1980s, around the time Beverly Hills Cop made him a familiar face, he dated All My Children actress Marcy Walker. The two were briefly engaged before they split, and Walker later left acting to become a youth minister.
The same stretch gave him a story he still likes to tell, though it was never a romance. Pinchot met Carrie Fisher just after Beverly Hills Cop turned him into an overnight name in 1984, then crossed paths with her again on the set of an anthology series in 1985. Over dinner in Beverly Hills, Fisher told him, “Bronson, don’t fall in love with me,” then stood up, pulled her dress over her head, and got the two of them thrown out of the restaurant. He took the warning at face value.
His one lasting relationship came later. Starting in 1993, just after Perfect Strangers finished its run on ABC, he was with Amy Heckerling, the director behind Clueless and Fast Times at Ridgemont High. They got engaged in 1997 and separated the same year. Neither has explained what went wrong, and the public account of his love life ends there.
Why he never married
The fuller answer goes back to a childhood Pinchot has only recently described in public. He grew up poor in South Pasadena with a father he has called violent and abusive, a man the family sometimes had to escape while they waited for the police. His father later walked out, and Pinchot did not see him again until his mid twenties. School gave him little relief. He was taunted for being poor and overweight.
By the time Beverly Hills Cop and Perfect Strangers made him famous, he was living with a depression he was too afraid to treat, sure that a therapist would only confirm the worst about him. That weight came home with him. Describing one girlfriend to Page Six, he recalled walking in to a woman who “wouldn’t even look up from the TV.” When he finally did see a therapist, he said, they could not believe how long he had stayed. He has also said women pursued him throughout his fame and that he turned them away.
At 67, single and at ease
He is no recluse, and his days are full. He has stayed close to his Perfect Strangers costar Mark Linn-Baker, telling People in 2024 that the two talk constantly and that Linn-Baker is “embedded in my heart.” The pair reunited at a fan convention in Knoxville in 2025 and slipped back into their Balki and Larry act for the crowd.
The work has kept coming. He returned as the gallery worker Serge in Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F in 2024, then played a pastry chef in Shonda Rhimes’ Netflix mystery The Residence in 2025. He has also talked about looking after his elderly mother, including a day she fell and he could not lift her, which finally pushed him to start working out.
For most of his life, Pinchot has said, he felt locked in a dungeon with no way out. These days he describes knowing where the exit is. “I know how to get out,” he told Page Six. At 67, he is single and, by his own account, finally fine on his own.
