Shelley Long

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Shelley Long
Born Shelley Lee Long
August 23, 1949 (1949-08-23) (age 59)
Fort Wayne, Indiana
United States
Occupation Actress
Years active 1975 – present
Spouse(s) Bruce Tyson (1981-2004)

Shelley Lee Long (born August 23, 1949) is an American actress.

Contents

[edit] Early life

Long was born in Fort Wayne, Indiana on August 23,1949 at 7:00 am on Tuesday. The daughter of Evandine, a school teacher, and Leland Long, who worked in the rubber industry before becoming a teacher.[1] She was active on her high school speech team, and in 1967 she won the National Forensic League National Championship in Original Oratory. She delivered a speech on the need for sex education in high school entitled "Sex Perversion Weed."[2] After graduating from South Side High School in Fort Wayne, she studied drama at Northwestern University, but left before graduating to pursue a career in acting and modelling. Her first break as an actress occurred when she began doing commercials in the Chicago area for a furniture company called Homemakers.

[edit] Career

[edit] Early roles

In Chicago, she joined The Second City comedy troupe, and in 1975, she began writing, producing, and co-hosting the television program Sorting It Out. The local NBC broadcast went on to win three Emmy Awards for Best Entertainment Show. Her first notable role came in the 1979 television movie The Cracker Factory, in which she portrayed a psychiatric inmate opposite Natalie Wood. The following year she appeared in A Small Circle of Friends with Brad Davis and Karen Allen. The film about social unrest at Harvard University during the 1960s was a critical success. In 1981, she played the role of Tala in the Ringo Starr film Caveman, starring opposite Dennis Quaid.

She was also featured as Belinda in Ron Howard's comedy Night Shift (co-starring Henry Winkler and Michael Keaton), about life working on the night shift at a city morgue, and starred with Tom Cruise in the 1983 comedy film Losin' It.

[edit] Cheers

Although she had been in feature films, Long became famous as the character Diane Chambers in the long-running television sitcom Cheers. The show was slow to capture an audience but eventually became one of the most popular on the air and made Long a sought-after actress for films.

In 1984, she was nominated for a Best Leading Actress Golden Globe for her performance in Irreconcilable Differences. She then appeared in a series of comedies, such as The Money Pit starring Tom Hanks (1986), Outrageous Fortune with Bette Midler and Peter Coyote (1987) and Hello Again with Corbin Bernsen (1987).

Long left Cheers after Season 5 in 1987. Producers reportedly offered her $400,000 per episode to stay but Long refused. Reports said that Long left because she did not have good relations with co-stars (who allegedly found her overbearing), and that she wanted to have a film career. Long said in later interviews her decision was one of the hardest she ever made and that she loved every minute of working on Cheers.

In a 2003 interview on The Graham Norton Show, Long said she left for a variety of reasons, the most important of which was her desire to spend more time with her newborn daughter.

[edit] Post-Cheers projects

Her first post-Cheers project was Troop Beverly Hills, a comedy in which she played a housewife who starts a "Wilderness Girl" troop as a distraction from her divorce proceedings.

Long took several roles, such as Don't Tell Her It's Me and Frozen Assets, that turned out to be commercially unsuccessful.

In 1992, she appeared in Fatal Memories: The Eileen Franklin Story, a fact-based television drama about a woman who remembers, later in life, the childhood trauma of being raped by her father and his cronies, and witnessing his murdering her childhood friend to prevent the child from "telling on him." The still controversial "recovered memories" basis for the prosecution resulted in the conviction and sentence of life imprisonment of George Franklin, Sr., a conviction that was later overturned.

In 1993, the actress returned to Cheers for its series finale. She also starred in the short lived sitcom Good Advice with Treat Williams and Teri Garr, but the show was canceled after two seasons. She later resurfaced as Diane for several episodes of the spinoff series Frasier.

[edit] Later work

Long achieved her greatest success in quite a while as mom Carol Brady in the 1995 hit film The Brady Bunch Movie, a campy take on the popular television show. In 1996, she reprised her role in A Very Brady Sequel, which had more modest success.

A series of ventures followed such as the made for TV remake of Freaky Friday, and the family sitcom Kelly Kelly, which only lasted for a few episodes. She played the Wicked Witch of the Beanstalk in a 1997 episode of Sabrina, the Teenage Witch.

In 2000, Long took a supporting role in a Richard Gere film, Dr. T and the Women, directed by Robert Altman. She later returned for a third go-around as Carol Brady in The Brady Bunch in the White House.

She played Mitzi Robinson in the 2005 independent film Trust Me. In the early and mid 2000s, Long guest-starred on several sitcoms such as 8 Simple Rules where she played John Ratzenberger's (her old Cheers co-star) wife, and Yes, Dear where she and Alan Thicke portrayed a snobby couple interested in buying the house next door to Greg and Kim.

As reported by multiple news outlets including Fox News, in November 2004, Long was rushed to the hospital after an overdose of painkillers.[3]

As part of her comeback, in January 2009, Long is scheduled to open the San Francisco company of Wicked as Madame Morrible for a limited engagement.

[edit] Awards

[edit] Emmy Award

  • 1983 - Outstanding Lead Actress - Comedy Series - Cheers

[edit] Emmy Award nominations

  • 1984 - Outstanding Lead Actress - Comedy Series - Cheers
  • 1985 - Outstanding Lead Actress - Comedy Series - Cheers
  • 1986 - Outstanding Lead Actress - Comedy Series - Cheers
  • 1993 - Outstanding Guest Actress - Comedy Series - Cheers
  • 1995 - Outstanding Guest Actress - Comedy Series - Frasier

[edit] Filmography

Features:

Short Subjects:

  • The Key (1977) (voice)

[edit] Television work

[edit] References

  1. ^ Shelley Long - Yahoo! TV
  2. ^ http://www.nflonline.org/uploads/StudentResources/ootopics.pdf
  3. ^ [1]

[edit] External links

v • d • e
Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actress - Comedy Series

Mary Tyler Moore (1976) · Beatrice Arthur (1977) · Jean Stapleton (1978) · Ruth Gordon (1979) · Cathryn Damon (1980) · Isabel Sanford (1981) · Carol Kane (1982) · Shelley Long (1983) · Jane Curtin (1984) · Jane Curtin (1985) · Betty White (1986) · Rue McClanahan (1987) · Beatrice Arthur (1988) · Candice Bergen (1989) · Candice Bergen (1990) · Kirstie Alley (1991) · Candice Bergen (1992) · Roseanne Barr (1993) · Candice Bergen (1994) · Candice Bergen (1995) · Helen Hunt (1996) · Helen Hunt (1997) · Helen Hunt (1998) · Helen Hunt (1999) · Patricia Heaton (2000)
v • d • e
The Brady Bunch
People
TV series
TV movies
TV specials
Feature films
Stage shows
Books
List of The Brady Bunch episodes


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