“Survivor” Legend Sonja Christopher Dies at Age 87

Sonja Christopher, who became the first contestant eliminated from “Survivor” during its debut season on CBS back in 2000 at the age of 63, has passed away at the age of 87. The show’s official Instagram page confirmed her death with a message shared by host Jeff Probst: “Sonya was one of the kindest people to ever play Survivor.” In addition to her warm spirit and winning smile during appearances on set or events over time, Probst continued, every interaction he had with Christopher had been pleasant. Several cast members from more recent seasons also paid tribute online upon learning about her death earlier this week (April 26). Liz Wilcox of the current season noted that while competing against Christopher in a holiday-themed challenge on set last December, she was struck by how vibrant and spunky she remained. In fact, according to an interview with Entertainment Weekly for “Survivor”‘s twentieth anniversary celebration back in 2020, Christopher felt especially driven by life post–survival of breast cancer roughly three years earlier — the time at which CBS began recruiting its inaugural cohort for a televised experiment about who could last longest on an isolated island. “I was reading the morning paper,” she explained to EW’s Daniel Fienberg, “and it said something in an article about CBS looking for 16 Americans to cast away on a deserted island and see who could survive for thirty-nine days.” Christopher admitted that while some viewers might have suspected ageism based around how much physical stamina proved problematic once voting had started on Day Nine (and, by extension, the fact she was then sixty-three), it wasn’t something to which she ever ascribed: “To this day,” she recalled during EW’s retrospective, “I still have bruises that don’t go away.” Regardless of how her time on set ended up unfolding, Christopher remained a devoted fan. In fact, as recently as 2017 (when the show was in its thirty-second cycle), she boasted on social media to her more than fourteen thousand Twitter followers about never having missed an episode over roughly seventeen years of broadcasts — and vowed that “I hope they don’t vote me off” if or when the giant Tribal Council up yonder ultimately gets rolling, since a 2015 surgery to mend multiple fractures had left her in something close to perpetual pain.