Candice Bergen

Candice Patricia Bergen (born May 9, 1946) is an American actress and former fashion model.

She is best known for starring in two TV series, as the title character on the situation comedy Murphy Brown (1988–1998), for which she won five Emmy Awards and two Golden Globe Awards; and as Shirley Schmidt on the comedy-drama Boston Legal (2004–2008), for which she was nominated for two Emmys, a Golden Globe, and a Screen Actors Guild Award. She starred in several major films throughout the mid 1960s to early 1980s such as The Sand Pebbles, Carnal Knowledge, The Wind and the Lion, and Gandhi, receiving an Oscar nomination for her role in Starting Over. Her later career includes character roles in Miss Congeniality and Sweet Home Alabama.

Bergen was born in Beverly Hills, California. Her mother, Frances Bergen (née Westerman), was a Powers model who was known professionally as Frances Westcott.Her father, Edgar Bergen, was a ventriloquist, comedian, and actor. Her paternal grandparents were Swedish-born immigrants who anglicized their surname. As a child, Bergen was irritated at being referred to as Charlie McCarthy's little sister, Charlie McCarthy being her father's star dummy.

Bergen began appearing on her father's radio program at a young age, and in 1958, at age eleven, with her father on Groucho Marx's quiz show You Bet Your Life as Candy Bergen. She said that when she grew up she wanted to design clothes.

Bergen made her screen debut playing an aloof university student in The Group (1966), which delicately touched on the then-forbidden subject of lesbianism. Her second film in 1966 was The Sand Pebbles, in which she played Shirley Eckert, an assistant school teacher and missionary opposite Steve McQueen. The film was nominated for several Academy Awards. After starring in the French film Live for Life (1967) and The Magus (1968) with Michael Caine and Anthony Quinn, she was featured in a 1969 political satire, The Adventurers, playing a frustrated socialite who has a lesbian affair. In 1975 she starred with Sean Connery in The Wind and the Lion, as a headstrong American widow kidnapped in Morocco in 1904 along with her two young children.

Despite initial rocky reviews, she appeared in such films as Mike Nichols' provocative Carnal Knowledge (1971) and the Burt Reynolds romantic comedy Starting Over (1979), for which she received Academy Award and Golden Globe nominations for best supporting actress.

Bergen had roles in Western films including The Hunting Party and Bite the Bullet, both of which starred Gene Hackman. She was the love interest of Ryan O'Neal in the Love Story sequel, Oliver's Story, and portrayed a best-selling author in Rich and Famous (1981) with Jacqueline Bisset.

Bergen has written articles, a play, and a memoir, Knock Wood (1984). She has also studied photography and worked as a photojournalist. Considered one of Hollywood's most beautiful women, Bergen worked as a fashion model before she took up acting.

Candice Bergen attended the University of Pennsylvania, where she was elected both Homecoming Queen and Miss University, but acknowledges that her failure to take her education seriously resulted in her being asked to leave.

During the 1960s, Bergen and then-boyfriend Terry Melcher, the son of Doris Day, lived at 10050 Cielo Drive in Los Angeles, which was later occupied by Sharon Tate and her husband, Roman Polanski. Tate and four others were murdered in the home in 1969 by followers of Charles Manson. There was some initial speculation that Melcher may have been the intended victim.

A political activist, Bergen accepted a date with Henry Kissinger. During her activist days she participated in a Yippie prank when she, Abbie Hoffman, and others threw dollar bills onto the floor of the New York Stock Exchange in 1967, leading to its temporary shut-down.

On September 27, 1980, she married French film director Louis Malle (Bergen herself has traveled extensively and speaks French fluently). They had one child, a daughter named Chloé Malle, in 1985. The couple were married until Malle's death from cancer on Thanksgiving Day in 1995. Since June 15, 2000, she has been married to New York real estate magnate and philanthropist Marshall Rose.