Candice Bergen

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Date of Birth : May 9th 1946

Academy Award nominated and Golden Globe and Emmy Award winning American actress and former fashion model, known primarily for her roles in sitcoms and television. She is currently best known for her starring role on the television situation comedy Murphy Brown, and as William Shatner’s legal partner, Shirley Schmidt, on the ABC hit comedy-drama, Boston Legal.

Candice first appeared at age 11½ with her father on Groucho Marx’s quiz show You Bet Your Life in 1958 as Candy Bergen. She said that when she grew up she wanted to design clothes.

Bergen has written articles, a play, and a memoir. She has also studied photography and worked as a photojournalist. Considered one of Hollywood’s most beautiful women, Bergen worked as a fashion model but soon began acting. Despite initial rocky reviews, she appeared in such films as Carnal Knowledge and Starting Over, for which she received Oscar and Golden Globe nominations for best supporting actress.

On Murphy Brown, Bergen played a tough television reporter. Although the show was a successful comedy, it tackled important issues: Murphy Brown, a recovering alcoholic, became a single mother and later battled breast cancer. In 1992, then Vice President Dan Quayle criticized prime-time TV for showing the Murphy Brown character “mocking the importance of fathers by bearing a child alone and calling it just another lifestyle choice.” While his remarks became comedic fodder, they paved the way for a subsequent episode to explore the subject of family values within a diverse set of families. Remaining true to the show’s humor, Murphy arranges for a truckload of potatoes to be dumped in front of Quayle’s residence (a reference to an infamous incident in which Quayle misspelled the word potato as potatoe.) In real life, however, Bergen agreed with at least some of Quayle’s observations, saying Quayle’s speech was “a perfectly intelligent speech about fathers not being dispensable and nobody agreed with that more than I did,” according to the Associated Press. Bergen’s run on Murphy Brown was extremely successful; between 1989 and 1995 she was nominated for an Emmy Award seven times and won five. After her fifth win, she declined future nominations for her role as Murphy Brown.