Reclusive Cybill Shepherd, 76, steadies herself on a male minder during rare outing in Los Angeles

Eternal Hollywood blonde Cybill Shepherd was spotted steadying herself on the shoulder of her male assistant while out running errands Wednesday in Los Angeles.

The still-stunning actress, 76, was looking fit in aviator shades, a black turtleneck with silver cuff details, dark jeans and trainers, with her iconic mane swept up in a red scrunchie.

The showbiz veteran with a six-decade career is bouncing back after a series of unsteady sightings.

Shepherd appears to have cast aside the hiking stick she was seen using when previously out and about with her unidentified helper, who’s accompanied her in public repeatedly over the past few years. 

The four-time Emmy nominee’s friends have reportedly long been concerned about the well-being of the former model, whose stunning face adorned more than a dozen Glamour magazine covers in her 70s heyday.

‘She has been frail for years, but these photos are shocking,’ a source close to the actress previously told Radar Online. ‘She … was hanging on for dear life to her assistant – it really looks as if she is on her last legs.’

The Daily Mail has reached out to Shepherd’s reps for comment. 

Alas, the Moonlighting legend is nothing if not a survivor.

‘That’s taken a lot of work,’ Shepherd admitted to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette in 2016. ‘As we age, particularly as women, you never imagine that your body is going to actually look the way it’s going to look… You try to keep a healthy perspective, but it’s shocking.’

The silver screen siren’s iconic film debut in the Oscar-winning The Last Picture Show was overshadowed by her scandalous affair with its married director, Peter Bogdanovich.

She went on to earn critical acclaim as the snarky golden girl of Elaine May’s The Heartbreak Kid (1972) opposite Charles Grodin before being pummeled with scathing notices for a pair of followup films with the late Bogdanovich.

The one-two punch of the director’s flop Henry Miller adaptation Daisy Miller (1974), and the infamous musical At Long Last Love (1976), which found her warbling Cole Porter classics with noted vocalist Burt Reynolds, served as the wrong kind of Hollywood knockout.

The latter box office bomb inspired film critic Gene Shalit to declare: ‘In this movie, Cybill Shepherd appears as if she cannot walk or talk, much less sing.’ 

The Memphis-born blonde rebounded briefly as Betsy the political campaign babe in Martin Scorsese’s classic stalker study Taxi Driver (1976) before retreating to her native Tennessee to start a family with a local auto parts dealer David Ford in 1978.

She gave birth to their actress daughter, Clementine Ford, now 47, in 1979 before divorcing Ford in 1982.

After a handful of long forgotten B movies, Shepherd tested her mettle in regional theater productions. After training with renowned acting coach Stella Adler, she was poised for a major comeback.

Shepherd returned to the screen in a string of sexy TV movies and series guest spots before earning the role that would once again make her a bona fide household name.

The Yellow Rose, a cornpone NBC series co-starring Sam Elliott that attempted to cash in on the prime time soap craze launched by CBS’s Dallas, was short-lived but reminded industry honchos just how captivating she could be.

Based on positive buzz surrounding her media appearances at the time, she was offered the role of former model Maddie Hayes in the smash hit ABC gumshoe series Moonlighting, opposite a then-unknown Bruce Willis.

In her 2000 memoir, Cybill Disobedience, Shepherd revealed how their on-screen chemistry nearly spilled into real life. 

‘Are we going to do something about this or what?’ she recalls asking her costar before they started necking, ‘passionately.’ Alas, Shepherd and the Diehard star wisely ‘never did finish what we started.’

She was married to chiropractor Bruce Oppenheim from 1987 to 1990. 

The two share 39-year-old twins Ariel and Cyrus, who were born during the fourth season of Moonlighting, which led to her frequent absences from filming and on-set tensions with showrunner Glenn Gordon Caron. 

At some point during this time, Shepherd launched a brief, secret affair with famed American novelist Larry McMurtry, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Last Picture Show, Terms of Endearment and Lonesome Dove. 

McMurtry, who died at 84 in 2021, dedicated his 1987 novel Texasville to the muse-actress. 

She later reunited with Bogdanovich and Jeff Bridges for the book’s 1990 film adaptation, a sequel to the movie that made them all stars.

The ensuing decades saw Shepherd assuming recurring roles in TV movies and series such as The L Word, The Client List and Psych, among others.

The multitalented performer, who recorded three studio albums in the 1970s, has also returned to the live stage in 2025 and 2026.

The lyric soprano recently completed a series of concert dates at venues in Hollywood and Palm Springs.

‘I’ve gotten everything out of the way that I’ve wanted to accomplish,’ she told People of having  ‘a lot of love and fun’ doing her new cabaret-style show. 

‘I’ve been very, very fortunate like that… older feels better.’

The enduring star last shined onscreen in 2023’s How to Murder Your Husband, which gave her a deliciously villainous star turn opposite fellow 80s icon Steve Guttenberg. 

She made it clear at the time that she’s not afraid of the aging process.

‘One of my favorite sayings is to “flaunt what you’ve got left,”‘ Shepherd told the Las Vegas Review-Journal. ‘I approach each age thinking this is the best time for me as a woman. I believe that if you love yourself as you age, it’s easier to accept some of the changes.’

‘Being older means you can truly avoid making the same old mistakes, plus you realize now that it’s not about you, but what you can give back,’ she added. 

‘Life now becomes more of a spiritual journey.”